Commensurate–incommensurate transition in graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

By C. Woods, L. Britnell, A. Eckmann, R. Ma, J. C. Lu, H. Guo, X. Lin, G. Yu, Y. Cao, R. Gorbachev and 11 more. Nature Physics, 2014

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When a crystal is subjected to a periodic potential, under certain circumstances it can adjust itself to follow the periodicity of the potential, resulting in a commensurate state. Of particular interest are topological defects between the two commensurate phases, such as solitons and domain walls. Here we report a commensurate–incommensurate transition for graphene on top of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Depending on the rotation angle between the lattices of the two crystals, graphene can either stretch to adapt to a slightly different hBN periodicity (for small angles, resulting in a commensurate state) or exhibit little adjustment (the incommensurate state). In the commensurate state, areas with matching lattice constants are separated by domain walls that accumulate the generated strain. Such soliton-like objects are not only of significant fundamental interest, but their presence could also explain recent experiments where electronic and optical properties of graphene-hBN heterostructures were observed to be considerably altered. A single layer of graphene on top of a hexagonal boron-nitride sheet can stretch to form a commensurate structure, or not — depending on the rotation angle between the two layers. In the case of commensurability, strain gets concentrated in domain walls, resulting in soliton-like structures.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2330850d6b57a3edd3fe2f4cc17f074ffb71ae57

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Citations in the corpus

Random Strain Fluctuations as Dominant Disorder Source for High-Quality On-Substrate Graphene Devices (2014, background): “[50] C.”
2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures (2016, background): “Such commensurate-incommensurate transition happens at a critical angle, which is given by the crystal mismatch (10).”
A review on mechanics and mechanical properties of 2D materials—Graphene and beyond (2016, background): “The vdW interactions between graphene and hBN led to a commensurate–incommensurate transition and surface reconstruction with locally stretched graphene separated by incommensurate regions [356].”