title: Strain-induced growth of oriented graphene layers revealed by in situ transmission electron microscopy observation.
abstract: We report on the observation of the strain-induced oriented alignment of graphene layers during the in situ 80 keV e-beam irradiation of an amorphous carbon structure using an aberration corrected (Cs-corrected) electron transmission microscope. E-beam irradiation promoted the amorphous-to-ordered structure transformation and contributed to the formation of small sized graphene flakes by local structure reconstruction. In the mean time, graphene flakes were driven to rotate and re-orient along the strain direction under the uni-axial stress conditions, which finally connected with each other and produced a high oriented structure. Our observations suggest that strain engineering could be an effective method in tuning the microstructure and properties especially in layer-structured materials.
authors.affiliation: SEU-FEI Nano Pico Center, Key Laboratory of MEMS of Ministry of Education, School of Electronics Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, P. R. China. wn@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Neng
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Condensed Matter Spectroscopy and Opto-Electronic Physics, and Key Laboratory of Artificial Structures and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education), Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.affiliation: School of Physical Science & Technology, Guangxi Key Laboratory for Relativistic Astrophysics, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lin