Type
ArticleAuthors
Skowron, Stephen T.Koroteev, Victor O.
Baldoni, Matteo
Lopatin, Sergei

Zurutuza, Amaia
Chuvilin, Andrey

Besley, Elena
KAUST Department
Electron MicroscopyDate
2016-04-12Online Publication Date
2016-04-12Print Publication Date
2016-08Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/605181
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The formation and healing processes of the fundamental topological defect in graphitic materials, the Stone-Wales (SW) defect, are brought into a chemical context by considering the rotation of a carbon-carbon bond as chemical reaction. We investigate the rates and mechanisms of these SW transformations in graphene at the atomic scale using transmission electron microscopy. We develop a statistical atomic kinetics formalism, using direct observations obtained under different conditions to determine key kinetic parameters of the reactions. Based on the obtained statistics we quantify thermally and irradiation induced routes, identifying a thermal process of healing with an activation energy consistent with predicted adatom catalysed mechanisms. We discover exceptionally high rates for irradiation induced SW healing, incompatible with the previously assumed mechanism of direct knock-on damage and indicating the presence of an efficient nonadiabatic coupling healing mechanism involving beam induced electronic excitations of the SW defect.Citation
Reaction kinetics of bond rotations in graphene 2016 CarbonSponsors
E.B. acknowledges the ERC Consolidator grant. A.C. acknowledges a financial support from FEI Company (Netherlands) within a collaborative project. M. B. and E. B. are grateful to the High Performance Computing (HPC) Facility at the University of Nottingham for providing computational time. A.C. and V.K. acknowledge financial support via FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES N295180 MagNonMag project.Publisher
Elsevier BVJournal
CarbonAdditional Links
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0008622316302810ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1016/j.carbon.2016.04.020