The Coulombic Nature of the van der Waals Bond Connecting Conducting Graphene Layers in Graphite

Abstract

Carbon forms a variety of compounds with single, double, triple and the intermediate resonance bonds with atoms of its own or other kinds. This paper is concerned with graphite, a very useful material, which is a stack of electrically conducting graphene layers held together by weak van der Waals (vdW) bonds. It crystallizes in hexagonal and rhombohedral forms, in which the hexagon inter-planar bond distance is 0.34 nm. Here a new and simple approach accounts for this bond length and shows the coulombic nature of the vdW bond.