Stacking faults and partial dislocations in graphene

Abstract

We investigate two mechanisms of crystallographic slip in graphene, corresponding to glide and shuffle generalized stacking faults (GSF), and compute their γ-curves using Sandia National Laboratories Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS). We find evidence of metastable partial dislocations for the glide GSF only. The computed values of the stable and unstable stacking-fault energies are suggestive of a high stability of full dislocations against dissociation and of dislocation dipoles against annihilation.

Keywords:

• graphene
• stacking faults
• dislocations
• dynamic stability

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain (DPI2009-14305-C02-01) and the support of the Consejería de Innovación of Junta de Andalucía (P09-TEP-4493). Support for this study was also provided by the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Award Number DE-FC52-08NA28613 through Caltech's ASC/PSAAP Center for the Predictive Modeling and Simulation of High Energy Density Dynamic Response of Materials.