The joining of graphene sheets under Ar ion beam irradiation

In this paper, Ar ion beam irradiation was proposed as a method to join the overlapped graphene sheets and the joining process was researched by classical molecular dynamics simulation. The results showed that the ion irradiation behavior could successfully induce the joining of overlapped graphene sheets. The joining results were found to be attributed to the saturation of dangling bonds generated during irradiation. Meanwhile, it was confirmed that the ion parameters had influence on the properties of the joint and the optimum ion parameters were obtained using tensile test simulation. The optimum ion dose and ion energy were 1.9 x 10(15) ions/cm2 and 60 eV, respectively. To emphasize the importance of the irradiation, we further studied the joining possibilities of graphene sheets when the irradiation was replaced by a large force (160 nN) acting on the upper sheet and we demonstrated that the joining results wouldn't happen without the irradiation. At last, the influence of the chirality of the graphene sheets on the joining process were discussed, and it was found that graphene sheets with the same chirality had higher matching-degree, which would result in better joint.