For centuries, cutting and folding the papers with special patterns have been
used to build beautiful, flexible and complex three-dimensional structures.
Inspired by the old idea of kirigami (paper cutting), and the outstanding
properties of graphene, recently graphene kirigami structures were fabricated
to enhance the stretchability of graphene. However, the possibility of further
tuning the electronic and thermal transport along the 2D kirigami structures
have remained original to investigate. We therefore performed extensive
atomistic simulations to explore the electronic, heat and load transfer along
various graphene kirigami structures. The mechanical response and thermal
transport were explored using classical molecular dynamics simulations. We then
used a real-space Kubo-Greenwood formalism to investigate the charge transport
characteristics in graphene kirigami. Our results reveal that graphene kirigami
structures present highly anisotropic thermal and electrical transport.
Interestingly, we show the possibility of tuning the thermal conductivity of
graphene by four orders of magnitude. Moreover, we discuss the engineering of
kirigami patterns to further enhance their stretchability by more than 10 times
as compared with pristine graphene. Our study not only provides a general
understanding concerning the engineering of electronic, thermal and mechanical
response of graphene but more importantly can be useful to guide future studies
with respect to the synthesis of other 2D material kirigami structures, to
reach highly flexible and stretchable nanostructures with finely tunable
electronic and thermal properties.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, 1 supplementary figur
