Mechanically-tunable bandgap closing in 2D graphene phononic crystals

We present a tunable phononic crystal which can be switched from a mechanically insulating to a mechanically conductive (transmissive) state. Specifically, in our simulations for a phononic lattice under biaxial tension (σxx = σyy = 0.01 Nm⁻¹), we find a bandgap for out-of-plane phonons in the range of 48.8–56.4 MHz, which we can close by increasing the degree of tension uniaxiality (σxx/σyy) to 1.7. To manipulate the tension distribution, we design a realistic device of finite size, where σxx/σyy is tuned by applying a gate voltage to a phononic crystal made from suspended graphene. We show that the bandgap closing can be probed via acoustic transmission measurements and that the phononic bandgap persists even after the inclusion of surface contaminants and random tension variations present in realistic devices. The proposed system acts as a transistor for MHz-phonons with an on/off ratio of 10^5 (100 dB suppression) and is thus a valuable extension for phonon logic applications. In addition, the transition from conductive to isolating can be seen as a mechanical analogue to a metal-insulator transition and allows tunable coupling between mechanical entities (e.g. mechanical qubits).

Jan N. Kirchhof, Kirill I. Bolotin