Woods C R, Withers F, Zhu M J, Cao Y, Yu G, Kozikov A, Ben Shalom M, Morozov S V, van Wijk M M, Fasolino A, Katsnelson M I, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Geim A K, Mishchenko A, Novoselov K S
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Institute of Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials RAS, Chernogolovka 142432, Russia.
Nat Commun. 2016 Mar 10;7:10800. doi: 10.1038/ncomms10800.
Microelectromechanical systems, which can be moved or rotated with nanometre precision, already find applications in such fields as radio-frequency electronics, micro-attenuators, sensors and many others. Especially interesting are those which allow fine control over the motion on the atomic scale because of self-alignment mechanisms and forces acting on the atomic level. Such machines can produce well-controlled movements as a reaction to small changes of the external parameters. Here we demonstrate that, for the system of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride, the interplay between the van der Waals and elastic energies results in graphene mechanically self-rotating towards the hexagonal boron nitride crystallographic directions. Such rotation is macroscopic (for graphene flakes of tens of micrometres the tangential movement can be on hundreds of nanometres) and can be used for reproducible manufacturing of aligned van der Waals heterostructures.
微机电系统能够以纳米精度进行移动或旋转，已在射频电子学、微衰减器、传感器等诸多领域得到应用。尤其令人感兴趣的是那些由于自对准机制和原子层面的作用力而能够在原子尺度上对运动进行精细控制的微机电系统。这类机器能够对外界参数的微小变化做出反应，产生精确控制的运动。在此，我们证明，对于六方氮化硼上的石墨烯体系，范德华力与弹性能之间的相互作用导致石墨烯朝着六方氮化硼的晶体学方向进行机械自旋转。这种旋转是宏观的（对于几十微米的石墨烯薄片，切向运动可达数百纳米），可用于可重复制造取向排列的范德华异质结构。
