The atomic structure and the properties of basal-plane dislocations in bilayer graphene, the thinnest imaginable crystal that can host such 1D defects, has been investigated by atomistic simulations. Our calculations show that the dislocations lead to a pronounced buckling of the graphene bilayers in order to release strain energy, leading to a complete delocalization of the residual compressive/tensile strain in the two graphene sheets. Furthermore, the absence of a stacking-fault energy, a unique peculiarity of bilayer graphene, gives rise to a splitting of the dislocations into equidistant partials with alternating Burgers vectors. Thus, dislocations in bilayer graphene show a distinctly different behavior than corresponding dislocations in graphite or other 3D crystals.
B. Butz, C. Dolle, F. Niekiel, K. Weber, D. Waldmann, H.B. Weber, B. Meyer, E. Spieker, Nature 505 (2014) 533.
