Growth of Graphene Nanocoil in a SiC Container: A Molecular Dynamics Study

Graphene nano structures find their application in modern nano electronics because of their excellent mechanical, unique electronics and electrical properties owing to the ballistic transport, where the charge carriers can move freely without getting scattered. In this work, we show a possibility to grow a miniaturised coil from a pre-existing graphene coil layer using molecular dynamics simulation. From our calculations it was observed that isolated carbon atoms get attached to the edge of the initial graphene coil and form an extension of the coil structure. The growth process depends strongly on the chirality of the growth front as well as the growth temperature. An optimal temperature between 2000 - 2300 K was proposed for all the edge structures except armchair (2500 K) type for the maximum number of the new hexagonal rings. Our results predict a technique that can be adopted experimentally to grow graphene nanocoil.