Suppression of anharmonicities in crystalline membranes by external strain

Abstract

In practice, physical membranes are exposed to a certain amount of external strain (tension or compression), due to the environment where they are placed. As a result, the behavior of the phonon modes of the membrane is modified. We show that anharmonic effects in stiff two-dimensional membranes are highly suppressed under the application of tension. For this, we consider the anharmonic coupling between bending and stretching modes in the self-consistent screening approximation (SCSA), and compare the obtained height-height correlation function in the SCSA to the corresponding harmonic propagator. The elasticity theory results are compared to atomistic Monte Carlo simulations for a graphene membrane under tension. We find that, while rather high values of strain are needed to avoid anharmonicity in soft membranes, strain fields less than 1% are enough to suppress all the anharmonic effects in stiff membranes, as graphene.

7 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Graphene as a Prototype Crystalline Membrane
• Temperature dependent resistivity in bilayer graphene due to flexural phonons
• Dynamics of 2D Material Membranes
• Non-Hookean statistical mechanics of clamped graphene ribbons
• The effect of rippling on the mechanical properties of graphene
• Covalent functionalization of strained graphene
• Statistical mechanics of thin spherical shells
• Anharmonic effects in the optical and acoustic bending modes of graphene
• Nonlinear phononics using atomically thin membranes
• Thermal buckling and symmetry breaking in thin ribbons under compression
• Anharmonicity of the acoustic modes of graphene
• Phonon dispersion in two-dimensional solids from atomic probability distributions
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