Highly stretchable graphene nanoribbon springs by programmable nanowire lithography

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Graphene nanoribbons are ideal candidates to serve as highly conductive, flexible, and transparent interconnections, or the active channels for nanoelectronics. However, patterning narrow graphene nanoribbons to <100 nm wide usually requires inefficient micro/nano fabrication processes, which are hard to implement for large area or flexible electronic and sensory applications. Here, we develop a precise and scalable nanowire lithography technology that enables reliable batch manufacturing of ultra-long graphene nanoribbon arrays with programmable geometry and narrow width down to ~50 nm. The orderly graphene nanoribbons are patterned out of few-layer graphene sheets by using ultra-long silicon nanowires as masks, which are produced via in-plane solid–liquid–solid guided growth and then transferred reliably onto various stiff or flexible substrates. More importantly, the geometry of the graphene nanoribbons can be predesigned and engineered into elastic two-dimensional springs to achieve outstanding stretchability of >30%, while carrying stable and repeatable electronic transport. We suggest that this convenient scalable nanowire lithography technology has great potential to establish a general and efficient strategy to batch-pattern or integrate various two-dimensional materials as active channels and interconnections for emerging flexible electronic applications.