Periodic buckling patterns of graphene/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure

Abstract

Graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) heterostructure has showed great potential to improve the performance of a graphene device. A graphene on an h-BN substrate may buckle due to the thermal expansion mismatch between the graphene and h-BN. We used an energy method to investigate the periodic buckling patterns including one-dimensional, square checkerboard, hexagonal, equilateral triangular and herringbone mode in a graphene/h-BN heterostructure under equi-biaxial compression. The total energy, consisting of cohesive energy, graphene membrane energy and graphene bending energy, for each buckling pattern is obtained analytically. At a compression slightly larger than the critical strain, all buckling patterns have the same total energies, which suggests that any buckling pattern may occur. At a compression much larger than the critical strain, the herringbone mode has the lowest total energy by significantly reducing the membrane energy of graphene at the expense of a slight increase of the bending energy of graphene and cohesive energy. These results may serve as guidelines for strain engineering in graphene/h-BN heterostructures.