Bending Rules in Graphene Kirigami

BF Grosso and EJ Mele, PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, 115, 195501 (2015).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.195501

The three-dimensional shapes of graphene sheets produced by nanoscale cut-and-join kirigami are studied by combining large-scale atomistic simulations with continuum elastic modeling. Lattice segments are selectively removed from a graphene sheet, and the structure is allowed to close by relaxing in the third dimension. The surface relaxation is limited by a nonzero bending modulus which produces a smoothly modulated landscape instead of the ridge-and-plateau motif found in macroscopic lattice kirigami. The resulting surface shapes and their interactions are well described by a new set of microscopic kirigami rules that resolve the competition between bending and stretching energies.

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