Engineering curvature in graphene ribbons using ultrathin polymer films

We propose a method to induce curvature in graphene nanoribbons in a controlled manner using an ultrathin thermoset polymer in a bimaterial strip setup and test it via molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Continuum mechanics shows that curvature develops to release the residual stress caused by the chemical and thermal shrinkage of the polymer during processing and that this curvature increases with decreasing film thickness; however, significant deformation is only achieved for ultrathin polymer films. Quite surprisingly, explicit MD simulations of the curing and annealing processes show that the predicted trend not just continues down to film thicknesses of 1-2 nm but that the curvature development is enhanced significantly in such ultrathin films due to surface tension effects. This combination of effects leads to very large curvatures of over 0.14 nm(-1) that can be tuned via film thickness. This provides a new avenue to engineer curvature and, thus, electromagnetic properties of graphene.