Reversible Control of In‐Plane Elastic Stress Tensor in Nanomembranes

• DOI: 10.1002/adom.201500779
• Publication Date: 2016-02-20T16:08:41Z
• Authors: Javier Martín‐Sán...; Rinaldo Trotta; Giovanni Piredda; Christian Schimpf; Giovanna Trevisi; Luca Seravalli; Paola Frigeri; Sandra Stroj; Thomas Lettner; Marcus Reindl; Johannes S. Wildmann; Johannes Edlinger; Armando Rastelli
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Materials Science; reversible strain control; Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences; Elastic strain engineering; nanomembranes; piezoelectric devices; electronic, optical and magnetic materials; Atomic and Molecular Physics; Optics; nanomembrane; 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology; 7. Clean energy

Strain engineering allows the physical properties of materials and devices to be widely tailored, as paradigmatically demonstrated by strained transistors and semiconductor lasers employed in consumer electronics. For this reason, its potential impact on our society has been compared to that of chemical alloying. Although significant progress has been made in the last years on strained nanomaterials, strain fields (which are of tensorial nature, with six independent components) are still mostly used in a "scalar" and/or static fashion. Here we present a new class of strain actuators which allow the three components of the in-plane stress tensor in a nanomembrane to be independently and reversibly controlled. The actuators are based on monolithic piezoelectric substrates, which are micro-machined via femtosecond-laser processing. Their functionality is demonstrated by "programming" arbitrary stress states in a semiconductor layer, whose light emission is used as a local and sensitive strain gauge. The results shown in this work open a new route to investigate and make use of strain effects in materials and devices.<br/>16 pages, 4 figures<br/>