Strain engineering of impurity-induced magnetism in doped graphene nanostructures: A first-principles study

Modulation of magnetism in low-dimensional systems could enable the development of novel devices in emerging quantum technologies. Mechanical strain has been shown to be an effective magnetic tuning technique in different low-dimensional materials. Regarding to magnetic systems, we are interested in the induced magnetism in graphene through the incorporation of impurities with only s and p electrons. In this work, we present a systematic study of the effect of uniaxial strain on the phosphorus-induced magnetism in graphene and its nanoribbons, performed by means of first-principles calculations. In order to analyze the dimensionality effects, we studied the monolayer and nanoribbons of different widths and edges (armchair and zig-zag), in the range from 0 to 10% of deformation. We find that for the monolayer, the uniaxial strain slightly modulates the magnetic moment, while for nanoribbons a magnetic phase transition is induced, but critical strain depends on nanoribbon width.