Graphene Cardboard: from Ripples to Tunable Metamaterial

Abstract

Recently graphene was introduced with tunable ripple texturing, a nanofabric enabled by graphene's remarkable elastic properties. However, one can further envision sandwiching the ripples, thus constructing composite nanomaterial, graphene cardboard. Here the basic mechanical properties of such structures are investigated computationally. It turns out that graphene cardboard is highly tunable material, for its elastic figures of merit vary orders of magnitude, with Poisson ratio tunable from 10 to -0.5 as one example. These trends set a foundation to guide the design and usage of metamaterials made of rippled van der Waals solids.