No Arabic abstract
We present a simple technique to fabricate graphene quantum dots in a cryostat. It relies upon the controlled rupture of a suspended graphene sheet subjected to the application of a large electron current. This results in the in-situ formation of a clean and ultra-narrow constriction, which hosts one quantum dot, and occasionally a few quantum dots in series. Conductance spectroscopy indicates that individual quantum dots can possess an addition energy as large as 180 meV and a level spacing as large as 25 meV. Our technique has several assets: (i) the dot is suspended, thus the electrostatic influence of the substrate is reduced, and (ii) contamination is minimized, since the edges of the dot have only been exposed to the vacuum in the cryostat.
We present a tight-binding theory of triangular graphene quantum dots (TGQD) with zigzag edge and broken sublattice symmetry in external magnetic field. The lateral size quantization opens an energy gap and broken sublattice symmetry results in a shell of degenerate states at the Fermi level. We derive a semi-analytical form for zero-energy states in a magnetic field and show that the shell remains degenerate in a magnetic field, in analogy to the 0th Landau level of bulk graphene. The magnetic field closes the energy gap and leads to the crossing of valence and conduction states with the zero-energy states, modulating the degeneracy of the shell. The closing of the gap with increasing magnetic field is present in all graphene quantum dot structures investigated irrespective of shape and edge termination.
The unusual electronic properties of graphene, which are a direct consequence of its two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb lattice, have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Creation of artificial lattices that recreate graphenes honeycomb topology, known as artificial graphene, can facilitate the investigation of graphene-like phenomena, such as the existence of massless Dirac fermions, in a tunable system. In this work, we present the fabrication of artificial graphene in an ultra-high quality GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well, with lattice period as small as 50 nm, the smallest reported so far for this type of system. Electron-beam lithography is used to define an etch mask with honeycomb geometry on the surface of the sample, and different methodologies are compared and discussed. An optimized anisotropic reactive ion etching process is developed to transfer the pattern into the AlGaAs layer and create the artificial graphene. The achievement of such high-resolution artificial graphene should allow the observation for the first time of massless Dirac fermions in an engineered semiconductor.
We investigate ground and excited state transport through small (d = 70 nm) graphene quantum dots. The successive spin filling of orbital states is detected by measuring the ground state energy as a function of a magnetic field. For a magnetic field in-plane of the quantum dot the Zemann splitting of spin states is measured. The results are compatible with a g-factor of 2 and we detect a spin-filling sequence for a series of states which is reasonable given the strength of exchange interaction effects expected for graphene.
We report measurements on a graphene quantum dot with an integrated graphene charge detector. The quantum dot device consists of a graphene island (diameter approx. 200 nm) connected to source and drain contacts via two narrow graphene constrictions. From Coulomb diamond measurements a charging energy of 4.3 meV is extracted. The charge detector is based on a 45 nm wide graphene nanoribbon placed approx. 60 nm from the island. We show that resonances in the nanoribbon can be used to detect individual charging events on the quantum dot. The charging induced potential change on the quantum dot causes a step-like change of the current in the charge detector. The relative change of the current ranges from 10% up to 60% for detecting individual charging events.
Using the tight-binding approximation we calculated the magnetic susceptibility of graphene quantum dots (GQD) of different geometrical shapes and sizes, smaller than the magnetic length, when the magnetic properties are governed by the electron edge states. Two types of edge states can be discerned: the zero-energy states (ZES) located exactly at the zero-energy Dirac point, and the dispersed edge states (DES) with the energy close, but not exactly equal to zero. DES are responsible for the temperature independent diamagnetic response, while ZES provide the temperature dependent spin Curie paramagnetism. The hexagonal, circular and randomly shaped GQDs contain mainly DES and, as a result, they are diamagnetic. The edge states of the triangular GQDs are ZES and these dots reveal the interplay between the spin paramagnetism, dominating for small dots and at low temperatures, and bulk orbital diamagnetism, dominating for large dots and at high temperatures.