Kinks and antikinks of buckled graphene: A testing ground for the φ4 field model

Kinks and antikinks of the classical phi(4) field model are topological solutions connecting its two distinct ground states. Here we establish an analogy between the excitations of a long graphene nanoribbon buckled in the transverse direction and phi(4) model results. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigated the dynamics of a buckled graphene nanoribbon with a single kink and with a kink-antikink pair. Several features of the phi(4) model have been observed including the kink-antikink capture at low energies, kink-antikink reflection at high energies, and a bounce resonance. Our results pave the way towards the experimental observation of a rich variety of phi(4) model predictions based on graphene.