Symmetry breaking and low energy conformational fluctuations in amorphous graphene

The figure shown here illustrates the out‐of‐plane deformation of one of the imaginary‐frequency normal modes in a flat amorphous graphene model. These imaginary modes have large components along the normal direction (relative to the longitudinal components). Such eigenvectors are localized on pentagons in the network (as color coded according to the bar adjacent), demonstrating their central role in inducing puckering from the flat sheet. The calculation was carried out with the local basis density functional code SIESTA. For further details see the article by Yuting Li and David A. Drabold on pp. 1012–1019.