On the Mechanical and Thermal Stability of Free-standing Monolayer Amorphous Carbon

Abstract

Recently (C.-T. Toh et al., Nature 577, 199 (2020)), the first synthesis of free-standing monolayer amorphous carbon (MAC) was achieved. MAC is a pure carbon structure composed of five, six, seven and eight atom rings randomly distributed. MAC proved to be surprisingly stable and highly fracture resistant. Its electronic properties are similar to boron nitride. In this work, we have investigated the mechanical properties and thermal stability of MAC models using fully-atomistic reactive molecular dynamics simulations. For comparison purposes, the results are contrasted against pristine graphene (PG) models of similar dimensions. Our results show that MAC and PG exhibit distinct mechanical behavior and fracture dynamics patterns. While PG after a critical strain threshold goes directly from elastic to brittle regimes, MAC shows different elastic stages between these two regimes. Remarkably, MAC is thermally stable up to 3600 K, which is close to the PG melting point. These exceptional physical properties make MAC-based materials promising candidates for new technologies, such as flexible electronics.

5 figures and 10 pages

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• Elastocaloric Effect in Graphene Kirigami
• Thermomechanical Insight into the Stability of Nanoporous Graphene Membranes
• Structure and mechanical properties of monolayer amorphous carbon and boron nitride
• A Concise Review of Recently Synthesized 2D Carbon Allotropes: Amorphous Carbon, Graphynes, Biphenylene and Fullerene Networks
• A Computational Study On the Mechanical Properties of Pentahexoctite Single-layer: Combining DFT and Classical Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Multiscale mechanics of thermal gradient coupled graphene fracture: A molecular dynamics study
• A DFT Study of the Electronic, Optical, and Mechanical Properties of a Recently Synthesized Monolayer Fullerene Network
• Length and torsion dependence of thermal conductivity in twisted graphene nanoribbons
• Disentangling morphology and conductance in amorphous graphene
• Dynamics and Structural Transformations of Carbon Onion-Like under High-Velocity Impacts