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arXiv · 1508.01528

Response of thermalized ribbons to pulling and bending

Andrej Kosmrlj·David R. Nelson
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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.

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Andrej Kosmrlj, David R. Nelson. 2015-08-06. Response of thermalized ribbons to pulling and bending. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.93.125431

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