Interplanar stiffness in defect-free monocrystalline graphite

The interplanar bond strength in graphite has been identified to be very low owing to the contribution of the van der Waals interaction. However, in this study, we use microscopic picosecond ultrasound to demonstrate that the elastic constant, $C_{33}$, along the $c$ axis of defect-free monocrystalline graphite exceeds 45 GPa, which is higher than reported values by 20\%. Existing theories fail to reproduce this strongly correlated interplanar system, and our results, thus, indicate the necessity for improvement. Since the LDA+U+RPA method, including both random phase approximation correlation and short-range correlation in $p$ Wannier orbitals, shows better agreement with the observation than LDA or even than ACFDT-RPA, the experimental results indicate non-negligible electron correlation effects with respect to both the short-range and long-range interactions.Comment: (Main text) 5 pages, 3 figures, (Supplementary material A) 2 pages, 2 figures, (Supplementary material B) 12 pages, 1 figur

Fundamental Study for a Graphite-Based Microelectromechanical System

We aimed to develop a process for constructing a carbon-based microelectromechanical system (MEMS). First, we prepared a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) crystal microsheet by exfoliation. We fabricated cantilevers and a double-clamped beam by controlling the thickness of the HOPG microsheet using a MEMS process. Second, we used a graphite sheet with contour line adhesion by metal sputter deposition. Third, we used a highly accurate graphite sheet with face adhesion and laser cutting. The first resonance frequencies were evaluated. We confirmed improvement in Q values to 1/10 level of a quarts vibrator, high performance, and a simple structure

Development of a high-density highly oriented graphite stripper

High-density highly oriented graphite sheets provided by Kaneka Corporation have been applied as stripper disks for heavy-ion acceleration at RIKEN RI Beam Factory since 2014. The graphite sheets withstand increasing amounts of beam intensity. We observed the graphite sheets after beam irradiation with an electron microscope and their lifetime was discussed