Strain engineering is an interesting strategy to tune a material’s electronic properties by subjecting its lattice to a mechanical deformation. Conventional straining approaches, used for 3D materials (including epitaxial growth on a substrate with a lattice parameter mis-match, the use of a dielectric capping layer or heavy ions implantation) are typically limited to strains lower than 2% in most cases due to the low maximum strains sustained by brittle bulk semiconducting materials. Bulk silicon, for example, can be strained only up to 1.5% before breaking. Moreover, these straining approaches induce static deformations of the semiconductor materials and therefore they are not suitable for tunable functional devices.<br/><br/>2D materials can be literally stretched, folded, bent or even pierced.[1] This outstanding stretchability (and the possibility of using dynamically varying strain) of 2D materials promises to revolutionize the field of strain engineering and could lead to "straintronic" devices – devices with electronic and optical properties that are engineered through the introduction of mechanical deformations.<br/><br/>In this talk I will discus our recent efforts to study strain engineering in 2D materials and to exploit it to fabricate strain tunable functional optoelectronic devices.[2-6]

Towards strain tunable optoelectronic devices

256th National Meeting (2018)

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