A new way of nano-engineering graphene by using defect domains was presented. These regions have ring structures that depart from the usual honeycomb lattice, though each C atom still had 3 nearest-neighbors. A set of stable domain structures was identified by using density functional theory, including blisters, ridges, ribbons, and metacrystals. All such structures were made solely out of C; the smallest encompasses just 16 atoms. Blisters, ridges, and metacrystals rise up out of the sheet, while ribbons remain flat. In the vicinity of vacancies, the reaction barriers to formation were sufficiently low that such defects could be synthesized through the thermally activated restructuring of coalesced adatoms.

Nanoengineering Defect Structures on Graphene. M.T.Lusk, L.D.Carr: Physical Review Letters, 2008, 100[17], 175503