Ultrastiff Graphene

Graphene has exceptionally high in-plane strength, which makes it ideal for various nanomechanical applications. At the same time, its exceptionally low out-of-plane stiffness makes it also flimsy and hard to handle, rendering out-of-plane structures unstable and difficult to fabricate. Therefore, from an application point of view, a method to stiffen graphene would be highly beneficial. Here we demonstrate that graphene can be significantly stiffened by using a laser writing technique called optical forging. We fabricate suspended graphene membranes and use optical forging to create stable corrugations. Nanoindentation experiments show that the corrugations increase graphene bending stiffness up to 0.8 MeV, five orders of magnitude larger than pristine graphene and corresponding to some 35 layers of bulk graphite. Simulations demonstrate that, in addition to stiffening by micron-scale corrugations, optical forging stiffens graphene also at the nanoscale. This magnitude of stiffening of an atomically thin membrane will open avenues for a plethora of new applications, such as GHz resonators and 3D scaffolds.