Article Title

Strain effects in graphene and graphene nanoribbons: The underlying mechanism

Authors

Yang Li, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Xiaowei Jiang, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Zhongfan Liu, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Zhirong Liu, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, State Key Laboratory for Structural Chemistry of Unstable and Stable Species, and Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Keywords

Graphene, graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), band gap, strain, first-principles calculations, tight-binding model

Abstract

A tight-binding analytic framework is combined with first-principles calculations to reveal the mechanism underlying the strain effects on electronic structures of graphene and graphene nanoribbons (GNRs). It provides a unified and precise formulation of the strain effects under various circumstances—including the shift of the Fermi (Dirac) points, the change in band gap of armchair GNRs with uniaxial strain in a zigzag pattern and its insensitivity to shear strain, and the variation of the k-range of edge states in zigzag GNRs under uniaxial and shear strains which determine the gap behavior via the spin polarization interaction.

Graphical Abstract

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-010-0015-7

Publisher

Tsinghua University Press

Recommended Citation

Yang Li,Xiaowei Jiang,Zhongfan Liu,Zhirong Liu, Strain effects in graphene and graphene nanoribbons: The underlying mechanism. NanoRes.2010, 3: 545–556