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In both research and industry, materials will be exposed to stresses, be it during fabrication, normal use, or mechanical failure. The response to external stress will have an important impact on properties, especially when atomic details govern the functionalities of the materials. This review aims at summarizing current research involving the responses of graphene and graphene materials to applied stress at the nanoscale, and to categorize them by stress-strain behavior. In particular, we consider the reversible functionalization of graphene and graphene materials by way of elastic deformation and strain engineering, the plastic deformation of graphene oxide and the emergence of such in normally brittle graphene, the formation of defects as a response to stress under high temperature annealing or irradiation conditions, and the properties that affect how, and mechanisms by which, pristine, defective, and polycrystalline graphene fail catastrophically during fracture. Overall we find that there is significant potential for the use of existing knowledge, especially that of strain engineering, as well as potential for additional research into the fracture mechanics of polycrystalline graphene and device functionalization by way of controllable plastic deformation of graphene.

Compared to graphene, the synthesis of large area atomically thin boron materials is particularly challenging, owing to the electronic shell structure of B, which does not lend itself to the straightforward assembly of pure B materials. This difficulty is evidenced by the fact that the first synthesis of a pure two-dimensional boron was only very recently reported, using silver as a growing substrate. In addition to experimentally observed 2D boron allotropes, a number of other stable and metastable 2D boron materials are predicted to exist, depending on growth conditions and the use of a substrate during growth. This first-principles study based on density functional theory aims at providing guidelines for the identification of these materials. To this end, this report presents a comparative description of a number of possible 2D B allotropes. Electronic band structures, phonon dispersion curves, Raman scattering spectra, and scanning tunneling microscopy images are simulated to highlight the differences between five distinct realizations of these B systems. The study demonstrates the existence of clear experimental signatures that constitute a solid basis for the unambiguous experimental identification of layered B materials.

In the last decade, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been intensively synthesized/ studied thus linking their morphological aspect to their physical properties, and consequently leading to the understanding of the possible benefits of defects in such materials. Nevertheless, for future applications, quantifying and identifying defects in TMDs is still a milestone to reach in order to better employ these materials in optoelectronic devices. Raman Spectroscopy has been successfully employed in graphene to quantify punctual or line defects. In this paper, we bombarded monolayer MoSe 2 with He ions and found out the existence of three defect activated Raman bands around 250-300 cm −1 . Density functional theory calculations were employed to obtain the electronic and phonon dispersion bands, making it possible to infer that these bands arise from inter-valley Raman double resonance processes. Interestingly, the same punctual defect model, that allows one to predict the defect concentration at which graphene starts to become amorphous, also works for TMDs. Hence, this work opens the door to the macroscopic quantification of defects in TMDs, which is essential for technological applications.