Observation of a snap-through instability in graphene

We examine the competition between adhesive and bending energies for few-layer graphene (FLG) samples placed on microscale-corrugated metallic substrates. Using atomic force microscopy, we show that the graphene undergoes a sharp “snap-through” transition as a function of layer thickness, where the material transitions between conforming to the substrate and lying flat on top of the substrate. By utilizing the critical snap-through thickness in an elasticity model for the FLG’s bending, we extract a value for graphene-surface adhesion energy of 1.1 eV/nm2.