No Arabic abstract
Since its inception in 2001, the science and technology of epitaxial graphene on hexagonal silicon carbide has matured into a major international effort and is poised to become the first carbon electronics platform. A historical perspective is presented and the unique electronic properties of single and multilayered epitaxial graphenes on electronics grade silicon carbide are reviewed. Early results on transport and the field effect in Si-face grown graphene monolayers provided proof-of-principle demonstrations. Besides monolayer epitaxial graphene, attention is given to C-face grown multilayer graphene, which consists of electronically decoupled graphene sheets. Production, structure, and electronic structure are reviewed. The electronic properties, interrogated using a wide variety of surface, electrical and optical probes, are discussed. An overview is given of recent developments of several device prototypes including resistance standards based on epitaxial graphene quantum Hall devices and new ultrahigh frequency analog epitaxial graphene amplifiers.
Wrinkling is a ubiquitous phenomenon in two-dimensional membranes. In particular, in the large-scale growth of graphene on metallic substrates, high densities of wrinkles are commonly observed. Despite their prevalence and potential impact on large-scale graphene electronics, relatively little is known about their structural morphology and electronic properties. Surveying the graphene landscape using atomic force microscopy, we found that wrinkles reach a certain maximum height before folding over. Calculations of the energetics explain the morphological transition, and indicate that the tall ripples are collapsed into narrow standing wrinkles by van der Waals forces, analogous to large-diameter nanotubes. Quantum transport calculations show that conductance through these collapsed wrinkle structures is limited mainly by a density-of-states bottleneck and by interlayer tunneling across the collapsed bilayer region. Also through systematic measurements across large numbers of devices with wide folded wrinkles, we find a distinct anisotropy in their electrical resistivity, consistent with our transport simulations. These results highlight the coupling between morphology and electronic properties, which has important practical implications for large-scale high-speed graphene electronics.
We present electronic structure calculations of few-layer epitaxial graphene nanoribbons on SiC(0001). Trough an atomistic description of the graphene layers and the substrate within the extended H{u}ckel Theory and real/momentum space projections we argue that the role of the heterostructures interface becomes crucial for the conducting capacity of the studied systems. The key issue arising from this interaction is a Fermi level pinning effect introduced by dangling interface bonds. Such phenomenon is independent from the width of the considered nanostructures, compromising the importance of confinement in these systems.
Growth of large-scale graphene is still accompanied by imperfections. By means of a four-tip STM/SEM the local structure of graphene grown on SiC(0001) was correlated with scanning electron microscope images and spatially resolved transport measurements. The systematic variation of probe spacings and substrate temperature has clearly revealed two-dimensional transport regimes of Anderson localization as well as of diffusive transport. The detailed analysis of the temperature dependent data demonstrates that the local on-top nano-sized contacts do not induce significant strain to the epitaxial graphene films.
The inhomogenous real-space electronic structure of gapless and gapped disordered bilayer graphene is calculated in the presence of quenched charge impurities. For gapped bilayer graphene we find that for current experimental conditions the amplitude of the fluctuations of the screened disorder potential is of the order of (or often larger than) the intrinsic gap $Delta$ induced by the application of a perpendicular electric field. We calculate the crossover chemical potential, $Delta_{rm cr}$, separating the insulating regime from a percolative regime in which less than half of the area of the bilayer graphene sample is insulating. We find that most of the current experiments are in the percolative regime with $Delta_{rm cr}<<Delta$. The huge suppression of $Delta_{rm cr}$ compared with $Delta$ provides a possible explanation for the large difference between the theoretical band gap $Delta$ and the experimentally extracted transport gap.
Variable-field Hall measurements were performed on epitaxial graphene grown on Si-face and C-face SiC. The carrier transport involves essentially a single-type of carrier in few-layer graphene, regardless of SiC face. However, in multi-layer graphene (MLG) grown on C-face SiC, the Hall measurements indicated the existence of several groups of carriers with distinct mobilities. Electrical transport in MLG can be properly described by invoking three independent conduction channels in parallel. Two of these are n- and p-type, while the third involves nearly intrinsic graphene. The carriers in this lightly doped channel have significantly higher mobilities than the other two.