2015/09/14 by Sandeep K. Jain, Vladimir Juričić, Vladimir Juricic +2
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Crystallinity #Density of states #Graphene #Graphene and Nanomaterials Applications #Graphene research and applications #Materials science #Nanotechnology #Physics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b01489
published as J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015,6,3897-3902
openalex publication_date 2015/09/14 · arxiv created 2015/10/28 · arxiv updated 2015/10/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The purity of graphene samples is of crucial importance for their experimental and practical use. In this regard, the detection of the defects is of direct relevance. Here, we show that structural defects in graphene samples give rise to clear signals in the vibrational density of states (VDOS) at specific peaks at high and low frequencies. These can be used as an independent probe of the defect density. In particular, we consider grain boundaries made of pentagon-heptagon pairs, and show that they lead to a shift of the characteristic vibrational D mode toward higher frequency; this distinguishes these line defects from Stone-Wales point defects, which do not lead to such a shift. Our findings may be instrumental for the detection of structural lattice defects using experimental techniques that can directly measure VDOS, such as inelastic electron tunneling and inelastic neutron spectroscopy.