  Steady progress in the miniaturization of structures and devices has reached
a scale where thermal fluctuations become relevant and it is thus important to
understand how such fluctuations affect their mechanical stability. Here, we
investigate the buckling of thermalized sheets and we demonstrate that thermal
fluctuations increase the critical buckling load due to the enhanced
scale-dependent bending rigidity for sheets that are much larger than a
characteristic thermal length scale. The presented results are universal and
apply to a wide range of microscopic sheets. These results are especially
relevant for atomically thin 2D materials, where thermal fluctuations can
significantly increase the critical buckling load because the thermal length
scale is on the order of nanometers at room temperature.
