Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets

Abstract

We demonstrate high-resolution modification of suspended multi-layer graphene sheets by controlled exposure to the focused electron beam of a transmission electron microscope. We show that this technique can be used to realize, on timescales of a few seconds, a variety of features, including nanometer-scale pores, slits, and gaps that are stable and do not evolve over time. Despite the extreme thinness of the suspended graphene sheets, extensive removal of material to produce the desired feature geometries is found to not introduce long-range distortion of the suspended sheet structure.