Response of thermalized ribbons to pulling and bending
Response of thermalized ribbons to pulling and bending
Motivated by recent free-standing graphene experiments, we show how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanical properties of microscopically thin solid ribbons, which can be many thousand times wider than their atomic thickness. A renormalization group analysis of flexural phonons reveals that elongated ribbons behave like highly anisotropic polymers, where the two …