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Abstract

Straintronics has recently attracted tremendous interest in van der Waals material systems due to its ability to tailor lattice structures and their interactions, opening pathways to exciting new quantum phases of matter, phenomena, and functionalities. In this talk, I will present our recent advances in straintronics. We have developed novel techniques to pattern and etch hBN with atomic-level flatness, enabling the fabrication of extremely smooth, arbitrary 3D nanoarchitectures. This provides new possibilities for strain engineering when 2D materials are integrated on the etched nanostructures.

Using this approach, we demonstrate that strain engineering allows the exploration of valley-orbit coupling, pseudo-magnetic fields, Berry curvature dipoles, and unconventional Hall responses in uniaxially corrugated graphene. Furthermore, we show that graphene can be transformed into a flat-band, strongly correlated electronic state by rearranging its strain patterns and distributions, leading to the emergence of nontrivial phenomena such as geometrically frustrated magnetism. The strength of our straintronics platform lies not only in the rich quantum phenomena and functionalities it enables, but also in its scalability. Our technique can be readily extended to a wide range of 2D materials and over large areas, providing a practical route toward real-world device integration and industrial applications.