Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 19: Graphene: Structural properties

O 19.9: Talk

Monday, March 31, 2014, 18:00–18:15, WIL C107

Relaxation of compressive stresses in graphene through mobile nanoripples — •Peter Klaver, Shouen Zhu, Marcel Sluiter, and Guido Janssen — Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

Graphene monolayers have a far smaller thermal expansion coefficient than the Cu substrates on which they are often grown through CVD at high temperature. Once the Cu substrate and graphene monolayer are cooled down to room temperature, the Cu contracts 1.5-2.0% more than the graphene. Yet various experiments do not show graphene layers on Cu to be under significant compressive stress. We present molecular dynamics simulations that show that under compressive stress, small ripples of just a few nm wide appear that absorb the excess graphene area. These ripples are quite mobile, even at room temperature. Their movement offers a mechanism to remove the compressive stress in graphene while keeping it flat, by absorbing the ripples into larger ripples (like those that have formed around bunches of step edges) or by eliminating the ripples at the edges of graphene islands. The relaxation of stresses through the movement of nanoripples is somewhat analogous to flattening out a red carpet by gradually moving a wrinkle away to the carpet edge instead of pulling the entire carpet all at once. The ease with which stresses in graphene relax, is not directly determined by the corrugation energy.