Nature Communications (Feb 2016)

Switchable friction enabled by nanoscale self-assembly on graphene

  • Patrick Gallagher,
  • Menyoung Lee,
  • Francois Amet,
  • Petro Maksymovych,
  • Jun Wang,
  • Shuopei Wang,
  • Xiaobo Lu,
  • Guangyu Zhang,
  • Kenji Watanabe,
  • Takashi Taniguchi,
  • David Goldhaber-Gordon

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10745
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 7

Abstract

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Graphene can exhibit pronounced frictional anisotropy, which was thought to arise because of nanoscale ripples. Here, the authors provide evidence that this effect could instead be a result of adsorbates that self-assemble into a highly regular superlattice of stripes with a period of four to six nanometres.