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The control of the local strain profile in 2D materials offers an invaluabletool for tailoring the electronic and photonic properties of solid-statedevices. In this paper, we demonstrate a local engineering of the excitonphotoluminescence (PL) energy of monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS2) by means ofstrain. We apply a local uniaxial stress to WS2 by exploiting electron-beampatterned and actuated polymeric micrometric artificial muscles (MAMs), whichwe implement onto monolithic synthetic WS2/graphene heterostructures. We showthat MAMs are able to induce an in-plane stress to the top WS2 layer of the vander Waals heterostructure and that the latter can slide on the grapheneunderneath with negligible friction. As a proof of concept for the localstrain-induced PL shift experiments, we exploit a two-MAM configuration inorder to apply uniaxial tensile stress on well-defined micrometric regions ofWS2. Remarkably, our architecture does not require the adoption of fragilesuspended microstructures. We observe a spatial modulation of the excitonic PLenergy of the WS2 monolayers under stress, which agrees with the expectedstrain profile and attains a maximum redshift of about 40 meV at the maximumstrain intensity point. After the actuation, a time-dependent PL blueshift isobserved in agreement with the viscoelastic properties of the polymeric MAMs.Our approach enables inducing local and arbitrary deformation profiles andcircumvents some key limitations and technical challenges of alternative strainengineering methods requiring the 2D material transfer and production ofsuspended membranes.

Local tuning of WS2 photoluminescence using polymeric micro-actuators in a monolithic van der Waals heterostructure