Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A chemically stable bilayers of SiO_{2} (2D silica) is a new, wide band gap 2D material. Up till now graphene has been the only 2D material where the bending rigidity has been measured. Here we present inelastic helium atom scattering data from 2D silica on Ru(0001) and extract the first bending rigidity, κ, measurements for a nonmonoatomic 2D material of definable thickness. We find a value of κ=8.8  eV±0.5  eV which is of the same order of magnitude as theoretical values in the literature for freestanding crystalline 2D silica.