Graphene ground states

Manuel Friedrich, Ulisse Stefanelli

Published 2018-02-14Version 1

Graphene is locally two-dimensional but not flat. Nanoscale ripples appear in suspended samples and rolling-up often occurs when boundaries are not fixed. We address this variety of graphene geometries by classifying all ground-state deformations of the hexagonal lattice with respect to configurational energies including two- and three-body terms. As a consequence, we prove that all ground-state deformations are either periodic in one direction, as in the case of ripples, or rolled up, as in the case of nanotubes.