Buckling, magnetic graphene can be a platform for stretchable electronics with many important applications, including eye-like digital cameras, energy harvesting, skin sensors, health monitoring devices like tiny robots and intelligent surgical gloves. The discovery opens the way to the development of devices for controlling nano-robots that may one day play a role in biological diagnostics and tissue repair.

Graphene is placed on a flat surface made of niobium diselenide, buckles when cooled to 4 degrees above absolute zero. To the electrons in graphene, the mountain and valley landscape created by the buckling appears as gigantic magnetic fields. These pseudo-magnetic fields are an electronic illusion, but they act as real magnetic fields.

Nature- Evidence of flat bands and correlated states in buckled graphene superlattices

Two-dimensional atomic crystals can radically change their properties in response to external influences, such as substrate orientation or strain, forming materials with novel electronic structure. An example is the creation of weakly dispersive, 'flat' bands in bilayer graphene for certain 'magic' angles of twist between the orientations of the two layers. The quenched kinetic energy in these flat bands promotes electron–electron interactions and facilitates the emergence of strongly correlated phases, such as superconductivity and correlated insulators. However, the very accurate fine-tuning required to obtain the magic angle in twisted-bilayer graphene poses challenges to fabrication and scalability. Here we present an alternative route to creating flat bands that does not involve fine-tuning.