Kinks and antikinks of buckled graphene: A testing ground for phi^4 field model

Abstract

Kinks and antikinks of the classical phi^4 field model are topological solutions connecting its two distinct ground states. Here we establish an analogy between the excitations of a long graphene nanoribbon buckled in the transverse direction and phi^4 model results. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigated the dynamics of a buckled graphene nanoribbon with a single kink and with a kink-antikink pair. Several features of phi^4 model have been observed including the kink-antikink capture at low energies, kink-antikink reflection at high energies, and a bounce resonance. Our results pave the way towards the experimental observation of a rich variety of phi^4 model predictions based on graphene.