Emergent magnetism in irradiated graphene nanostructures

We model the atomistic restructuring of different types of carbon nanoribbons as they are irradiated and subjected to uniaxial stress. Time scales relevant to realistic experimental conditions are achieved with an original Monte-Carlo algorithm that enacts rare events in a stochastic manner using the structure adjacency information. We use a Hubbard model Hamiltonian to analyze the appearance of magnetic domains emerging from the concerted rearrangement of armchair edged sections into zigzag configurations. The self-consistent Hamiltonian is also used to compute electronic transport properties to establish the presence of spin-polarized current flowing across the initially non-magnetic nanoribbons.