Thermomechanical properties of honeycomb lattices from internal-coordinates potentials: the case of graphene and hexagonal boron nitrides

A first-principles evaluation of these can be very demanding, and can be affected by numerical noise that breaks translational or rotational invariance. In order to overcome these challenges, we study the Gartstein internal-coordinate potential and tune its 13 parameters on the first-principles interatomic force constants for graphene.

We show that the resulting potential not only reproduces very well the phonon dispersions of graphene, but also those of carbon nanotubes of any diameter and chirality. The addition of a cubic term allows also to reproduce the dominant anharmonic terms, leading to a very good estimate of the lattice thermal conductivity. Finally, this potential form works very well also for boron nitride, provided it is fitted on the short-range (analytical) part of the interatomic force constants, and augmented thereafter with the long-range dielectric contribution.