Young's modulus of graphene: A molecular dynamics study

The Young's modulus of graphene is investigated through the intrinsic thermal vibration in graphene which is observed by molecular dynamics and the results agree very well with the recent experiment [Lee et al., Science 321, 385 (2008)]. This method is further applied to show that the Young's modulus of graphene (1) increases with increasing size and saturates after a threshold value of the size; (2) increases from 0.95 to 1.1 TPa as temperature increases in the region [100, 500] K; (3) is insensitive to the isotopic disorder in the low disorder region (<5%) and decreases gradually after further increasing the disorder percentage.