Quantifying the local mechanical properties of twisted double bilayer graphene

Canetta, Alessandra and Gonzalez-Munoz, Sergio and Nguyen, Viet-Hung and Agarwal, Khushboo and de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele, Pauline and Hong, Yuanzhuo and Mohapatra, Sambit and Watanabe, Kenji and Taniguchi, Takashi and Nysten, Bernard and Hackens, Benoît and Ribeiro-Palau, Rebeca and Charlier, Jean-Christophe and Kolosov, Oleg Victor and Spièce, Jean and Gehring, Pascal (2023) Quantifying the local mechanical properties of twisted double bilayer graphene. Nanoscale, 15 (18). pp. 8134-8140. ISSN 2040-3364

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Abstract

Nanomechanical measurements of minimally twisted van der Waals materials remained elusive despite their fundamental importance for device realisation. Here, we use Ultrasonic Force Microscopy (UFM) to locally quantify the variation of out-of-plane Young's modulus in minimally twisted double bilayer graphene (TDBG). We reveal a softening of the Young's modulus by 7% and 17% along single and double domain walls, respectively. Our experimental results are confirmed by force-field relaxation models. This study highlights the strong tunability of nanomechanical properties in engineered twisted materials, and paves the way for future applications of designer 2D nanomechanical systems.