  Among the different strategies used to induce the opening of a band gap in
graphene, one common practice is through chemical doping. While a gap may me
opened in this way, disorder-induced scattering is an unwanted side-effect that
impacts the electron mobility in the conductive regime of the system. However,
this undesirable side effect is known to be minimised if dopants interact
asymmetrically with the two sublattices of graphene. In this work we propose
that mechanical strain can be used to introduce such a sublattice asymmetry in
the doping process of graphene. We argue that a localised out-of-plane
deformation applied to a graphene sheet can make one of the graphene
sublattices more energetically favourable for impurity adsorption than the
other and that this can be controlled by varying the strain parameters. Two
complementary modelling schemes are used to describe the electronic structure
of the flat and deformed graphene sheets: a tight-binding model and density
functional theory. Our results indicate a novel way to select the doping
process of graphene through strain engineering.
