Elastic Properties of Hybrid Graphene/Boron Nitride Monolayer

TL;DR

This study uses density functional theory to investigate how the size of h-BN domains affects the elastic properties of graphene/h-BN hybrid monolayers, revealing a linear decrease in stiffness and sound velocity with increased h-BN content.

Contribution

It provides the first ab initio analysis of the impact of h-BN domain size on the elastic properties of graphene/h-BN hybrids.

Findings

In-plane stiffness decreases linearly with h-BN concentration.

Longitudinal sound velocity decreases linearly with h-BN concentration.

Elastic properties are tunable via h-BN domain size.

Abstract

Recently hybridized monolayers consisting of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) phases inside graphene layer have been synthesized and shown to be an effective way of opening band gap in graphene monolayers [1]. In this letter, we report an ab initio density functional theory (DFT)- based study of h-BN domain size effect on the elastic properties of graphene/boron nitride hybrid monolayers (h-BNC). We found both inplane stiffness and longitudinal sound velocity of h-BNC linearly decrease with h-BN concentration.