Eur. Phys. J. B 76, 463-467 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00222-3

Electronic structures for armchair-edge graphene nanoribbons under a small uniaxial strain

¹ Department of Physics and Key Laboratory for Low-Dimensional Structures and Quantum Manipulation (Ministry of Education), Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, P.R. China
² International Center for Materials Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110015, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a ghzhou@hunnu.edu.cn

Received: 6 February 2010
Revised: 2 June 2010
Published online: 16 July 2010

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the electronic structures for armchair-edge graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) under a small in-plane uniaxial strain along armchair (longitudinal) and zigzag (transversal) direction, respectively. We demonstrate that, by both the tight-binding calculation and first-principles study, the applying of a small asymmetrical strain results in variation of energy subband spacing, which opens a band gap for metallic AGNRs and modifies the band gaps for semiconducting AGNRs near the Fermi level. It is believed that these results are of importance in the band gap engineering and electromechanical applications of graphene-nanoribbon-based devices.