Measuring the mechanical strength of a material at the nanoscale is challenging . If the object we are measuring happens to be a two-dimensional material, the task amazingly difficult. But people at Castellanos-Gómez Lab are really smart. They’ve adapted a method (already used with organic thin films) to determine these materials Young Modulus that, apart from other advantages, does not require the material to be freely suspended.
To make a long story short, they compress the material. Not been freely suspended, ripples appear all over the material. The wavelength of this ripples depends only in the elastic properties of the film and the substrate, so voilá! Frankly, much easier to explain than to perform.
These results were published in Advanced Materials.
To illustrate it, and requested by Dr. Andrés Castellanos-Gómez, we did this image that made it to the back cover of Advanced Materials.