Thermal buckling transition of crystalline membranes in a field

Abstract

Two dimensional crystalline membranes in isotropic embedding space exhibit a flat phase with anomalous elasticity, relevant e.g., for graphene. Here we study their thermal fluctuations in the absence of exact rotational invariance in the embedding space. An example is provided by a membrane in an orientational field, tuned to a critical buckling point by application of in-plane stresses. Through a detailed analysis, we show that the transition is in a new universality class. The self-consistent screening method predicts a second order transition, with modified anomalous elasticity exponents at criticality, while the RG suggests a weakly first order transition.

5 pages (main text) + 25 pages (supplementary material), 3 figures; a published version for PRL, with minor edits and added references

References in corpus (10)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Thermalized buckling of isotropically compressed thin sheets
• Lifshitz gauge duality
• Spontaneous tilt of single-clamped thermal elastic sheets
• Emergent continuous symmetry in anisotropic flexible two-dimensional materials
• Buckling in a rotationally invariant spin-elastic model
• Thermalized buckling of extensible, semiflexible polymers
• A molecular dynamics simulation of thermalization of crystalline lattice with harmonic interaction
• Emergent dynamic stress regulators via coordinated thermal fluctuations and stress in harmonic crystalline lattices