Dynamics of fluctuations and thermal buckling in graphene from a phase-field crystal model

We study the effects of thermal fluctuations and pinned boundaries in graphene membranes by using a phase-field crystal model with out-of-plane deformations. For sufficiently long times, the linear diffusive behavior of height fluctuations in systems with free boundaries becomes a saturation regime, while at intermediate times the behavior is still subdiffusive as observed experimentally. Under compression, we find mirror buckling fluctuations where the average height changes from above to below the pinned boundaries, with the average time between fluctuations diverging below a critical temperature corresponding to a thermally induced buckling transition. Near the transition, we find a nonlinear height response in agreement with recent renormalization-group calculations and observed in experiments on graphene membranes under an external transverse force with clamped boundaries.