Shear strain induced modulation to the transport properties of graphene

Applying shear strain has been considered as a hopeful method to open a band gap of graphene. To study the transport properties of graphene under shear strain, a device was fabricated to apply shear strain, up to 16.7%, to graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition method. A top gate with ionic liquid as the dielectric material was used to tune the carrier density. The conductance of the Dirac point and carrier mobility is found to increase with a comparatively small increasing strain but then decrease with a larger one. Such a behavior might be related to several factors: the wrinkles, the transverse conducting channels, and the grain boundaries of graphene. Our study is helpful to further understand the strain engineering in graphene.