Strain engineering of flat bands in trilayer graphene

This is the preliminary work into our study of strain effects on the flat bands present in aligned ABC stacked trilayer graphene (TLG)/Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) heterostructures. The flat bands are a result of the Moiré patterns created between the TLG and hBN due to the small lattice constant mismatch and nearly 0 twist angle between the layers. Recent work has shown that these heterostructure have gate-tunable Mott insulating states at partial filling. We aim to expand on these results by applying stain to a ABC TLG/hBN heterostructure using a flexible substrate in place of the standard silicon substrate. The application of strain will modify the interlayer coupling between the TLG and hBN leading to a new platform to studying flat band physics.