We present measurements on side gated graphene constrictions of different geometries. We characterize the transport gap by its width in back gate voltage and compare this to an analysis based on Coulomb blockade measurements of localized states. We study the effect of an applied side gate voltage on the transport gap and show that high side gate voltages lift the suppression of the conductance. Finally we study the effect of an applied magnetic field and demonstrate the presence of edge states in the constriction.
We have developed the combination of an etching and deposition technique that enables the fabrication of locally gated graphene nanostructures of arbitrary design. Employing this method, we have fabricated graphene nanoconstrictions with local tunable transmission and characterized their electronic properties. An order of magnitude enhanced gate efficiency is achieved adopting the local gate geometry with thin dielectric gate oxide. A complete turn off of the device is demonstrated as a function of the local gate voltage. Such strong suppression of device conductance was found to be due to both quantum confinement and Coulomb blockade effects in the constricted graphene nanostructures.
We present a fabrication process for high quality suspended and double gated trilayer graphene devices. The electrical transport measurements in these transistors reveal a high charge carrier mobility (higher than 20000 cm^2/Vs) and ballistic electric transport on a scale larger than 200nm. We report a particularly large on/off ratio of the current in ABC-stacked trilayers, up to 250 for an average electric displacement of -0.08 V/nm, compatible with an electric field induced energy gap. The high quality of these devices is also demonstrated by the appearance of quantum Hall plateaus at magnetic fields as low as 500mT.
We investigate the effects of homogeneous and inhomogeneous deformations and edge disorder on the conductance of gated graphene nanoribbons. Under increasing homogeneous strain the conductance of such devices initially decreases before it acquires a resonance structure, and finally becomes completely suppressed at larger strain. Edge disorder induces mode mixing in the contact regions, which can restore the conductance to its ballistic value. The valley-antisymmetric pseudo-magnetic field induced by inhomogeneous deformations leads to the formation of additional resonance states, which either originate from the coupling into Fabry-Perot states that extend through the system, or from the formation of states that are localized near the contacts, where the pseudo-magnetic field is largest. In particular, the n=0 pseudo-Landau level manifests itself via two groups of conductance resonances close to the charge neutrality point.
An indirect exciton is a bound state of an electron and a hole in spatially separated layers. Two-dimensional indirect excitons can be created optically in heterostructures containing double quantum wells or atomically thin semiconductors. We study theoretically transmission of such bosonic quasiparticles through nano-constrictions. We show that quantum transport phenomena, e.g., conductance quantization, single-slit diffraction, two-slit interference, and the Talbot effect, are experimentally realizable in systems of indirect excitons. We discuss similarities and differences between these phenomena and their counterparts in electronic devices.
Quantum point contacts (QPCs) are cornerstones of mesoscopic physics and central building blocks for quantum electronics. Although the Fermi wave-length in high-quality bulk graphene can be tuned up to hundreds of nanometers, the observation of quantum confinement of Dirac electrons in nanostructured graphene systems has proven surprisingly challenging. Here we show ballistic transport and quantized conductance of size-confined Dirac fermions in lithographically-defined graphene constrictions. At high charge carrier densities, the observed conductance agrees excellently with the Landauer theory of ballistic transport without any adjustable parameter. Experimental data and simulations for the evolution of the conductance with magnetic field unambiguously confirm the identification of size quantization in the constriction. Close to the charge neutrality point, bias voltage spectroscopy reveals a renormalized Fermi velocity ($v_F approx 1.5 times 10^6 m/s$) in our graphene constrictions. Moreover, at low carrier density transport measurements allow probing the density of localized states at edges, thus offering a unique handle on edge physics in graphene devices.