Stone-Wales-type transformations in carbon nanostructures driven by electron irradiation

By J. Kotakoski, Jannik C. Meyer, S. Kurasch, D. Santos-Cottin, U. Kaiser, A. Krasheninnikov. 2011

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Observations of topological defects associated with Stone-Wales–type transformations (i.e., bond rotations) in high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images of carbon nanostructures are at odds with the equilibrium thermodynamics of these systems. Here, by combining aberration-corrected HRTEM experiments and atomistic simulations, we show that such defects can be formed by single electron impacts, and remarkably, at electron energies below the threshold for atomic displacements. We further study the mechanisms of irradiation-driven bond rotations, and explain why electron irradiation at moderate electron energies (∼100 keV) tends to amorphize rather than perforate graphene. We also show via simulations that Stone-Wales defects can appear in curved graphitic structures due to incomplete recombination of irradiation-induced Frenkel defects, similar to formation of Wigner-type defects in silicon.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Materials Chemistry, Structural Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d23c586ac87a3e5ef9746b2c551a10a3553303ef

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In Computational Mechanics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Primary radiation damage: A review of current understanding and models (2018, background): “cepts, and to determine threshold energies with high precision [173].”