Efficient Structural Relaxation of Polycrystalline Graphene Models

Federico D'Ambrosio, Gerard Barkema, Joris Barkema

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Large samples of experimentally produced graphene are polycrystalline. For the study of this material, it helps to have realistic computer samples that are also polycrystalline. A common approach to produce such samples in computer simulations is based on the method of Wooten, Winer, and Weaire, originally introduced for the simulation of amorphous silicon. We introduce an early rejection variation of their method, applied to graphene, which exploits the local nature of the structural changes to achieve a significant speed-up in the relaxation of the material, without compromising the dynamics. We test it on a 3200 atoms sample, obtaining a speed-up between one and two orders of magnitude. We also introduce a further variation called early decision specifically for relaxing large samples even faster, and we test it on two samples of 10,024 and 20,000 atoms, obtaining a further speed-up of an order of magnitude. Furthermore, we provide a graphical manipulation tool to remove unwanted artifacts in a sample, such as bond crossings
Original languageEnglish
Article number1242
Pages (from-to)1-11
Number of pages11
JournalNanomaterials
Volume11
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 May 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords

  • Graphene models
  • Monte carlo simulation
  • Polycrystalline graphene

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