Revealing Strain-Induced Effects in Ultrathin Heterostructures at the Nanoscale

Researchers from the Advanced Nanoscale Engineering group have reported in Nano Letters a technique to characterize stress effects at high resolution using Atomic Force Microscopes.  So far it has been very difficult to characterize strain effects in materials and here we have a technique that can do this at the nanoscale. In this paper we use strain sensitive two dimensional graphene based heterostructures as demonstrators and reveal modulation in their work function and junctions with strain.