Response of thermalized ribbons to pulling and bending

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal fluctuations influence the mechanical behavior of thin graphene-like ribbons, revealing anisotropic properties and non-trivial scaling laws through theoretical analysis and modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a renormalization group framework and transfer matrix approach to analyze thermal effects on ribbon mechanics, highlighting anisotropic scaling behaviors.

Findings

Persistence length scales non-trivially with width.

Effective bending rigidity exhibits power-law behavior.

Thermal fluctuations significantly alter mechanical responses.

Abstract

Motivated by recent free-standing graphene experiments, we show how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanical properties of microscopically thin solid ribbons. A renormalization group analysis of flexural phonons reveals that elongated ribbons behave like highly anisotropic polymers, where the two dimensional nature of ribbons is reflected in non-trivial power law scalings of the persistence length and effective bending and twisting rigidities with the ribbon width. With a coarse-grained transfer matrix approach, we then show how thermalized ribbons respond to pulling and bending forces over a wide spectrum of temperatures, forces and ribbon lengths.