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Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Pauli Repulsion-Induced Expansion and Electromechanical Properties of Graphene
Hui Wang1, Xiaonan Shan2, Hong-Yuan Chen1
1State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University , Nanjing 210093, China.
Abstract:
Because graphene has nearly zero density of states at the Dirac point, charging it must overcome Pauli repulsion. We show here that this repulsion causes graphene to expand, which is measurable with an optical edge-tracking method despite that graphene is the strongest material. The expansion increases quadratically with applied voltage as predicted by theory and has a coefficient of ∼10-4 per V at 1 V. Graphene has many attractive properties, but it lacks piezoelectricity, which limits its electromechanical applications. The observed Pauli repulsion-induced expansion provides an alternative way to electrically control graphene dimension. It also provides a simple and direct method to measure the elastic properties of graphene and other low dimensional materials.
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