Surface energies in a two-dimensional mass-spring model for crystals
We study an atomistic pair potential-energy () that describes the elastic behavior of two-dimensional crystals with atoms where characterizes the particle positions. The main focus is the asymptotic analysis of the ground state energy as tends to infinity. We show in a suitable scaling regime where the energy is essentially quadratic that the energy minimum of admits an asymptotic expansion involving fractional powers of : The bulk energy density ...