No Arabic abstract
This brief review discusses electronic properties of mesoscopic graphene-based structures. These allow controlling the confinement and transport of charge and spin; thus, they are of interest not only for fundamental research, but also for applications. The graphene-related topics covered here are: edges, nanoribbons, quantum dots, $pn$-junctions, $pnp$-structures, and quantum barriers and waveguides. This review is partly intended as a short introduction to graphene mesoscopics.
Nonequilibrium charge transport in superconductors has been investigated intensely in the 1970s and 80s, mostly in the vicinity of the critical temperature. Much less attention has been focussed on low temperatures, and the role of the quasiparticle spin. We report here on nonlocal transport in superconductor hybrid structures at very low temperatures. By comparing the nonlocal conductance obtained using ferromagnetic and normal-metal detectors, we discriminate charge and spin degrees of freedom. We observe spin injection and long-range transport of pure, chargeless spin currents in the regime of large Zeeman splitting. We elucidate charge and spin tranport by comparison to theoretical models. The observed long-range chargeless spin transport opens a new path to manipulate and utilize the quasiparticle spin in superconductor nanostructures.
Long coherence lifetimes of electron spins transported using moving potential dots are shown to result from the mesoscopic confinement of the spin vector. The confinement dimensions required for spin control are governed by the characteristic spin-orbit length of the electron spins, which must be larger than the dimensions of the dot potential. We show that the coherence lifetime of the electron spins is independent of the local carrier densities within each potential dot and that the precession frequency, which is determined by the Dresselhaus contribution to the spin-orbit coupling, can be modified by varying the sample dimensions resulting in predictable changes in the spin-orbit length and, consequently, in the spin coherence lifetime.
The magnetic field-dependent longitudinal and Hall components of the resistivity rho_xx(H) and rho_xy(H) are measured in graphene on silicon dioxide substrates at temperatures from 1.6 K to room temperature. At charge densities near the charge-neutrality point rho_xx(H) is strongly enhanced and rho_xy(H) is suppressed, indicating nearly equal electron and hole contributions to the transport current. The data are inconsistent with uniformly distributed electron and hole concentrations (two-fluid model) but in excellent agreement with the recent theoretical prediction for inhomogeneously distributed electron and hole regions of equal mobility. At low temperatures and high magnetic fields rho_xx(H) saturates to a value ~h/e^2, with Hall conductivity << e^2/h, which may indicate a regime of localized v = 2 and v = -2 quantum Hall puddles.
We numerically investigate the electronic transport properties between two mesoscopic graphene disks with a twist by employing the density functional theory coupled with non-equilibrium Greens function technique. By attaching two graphene leads to upper and lower graphene layers separately, we explore systematically the dependence of electronic transport on the twist angle, Fermi energy, system size, layer stacking order and twist axis. When choose different twist axes for either AA- or AB-stacked bilayer graphene, we find that the dependence of conductance on twist angle displays qualitatively distinction, i.e., the systems with top axis exhibit finite conductance oscillating as a function of the twist angle, while the ones with hollow axis exhibit nearly vanishing conductance for different twist angles or Fermi energies near the charge neutrality point. These findings suggest that the choice of twist axis can effectively tune the interlayer conductance, making it a crucial factor in designing of nanodevices with the twisted van der Waals multilayers.
In this review we discuss spin and charge transport properties in graphene-based single-layer and few-layer spin-valve devices. We give an overview of challenges and recent advances in the field of device fabrication and discuss two of our fabrication methods in more detail which result in distinctly different device performances. In the first class of devices, Co/MgO electrodes are directly deposited onto graphene which results in rough MgO-to-Co interfaces and favor the formation of conducting pinholes throughout the MgO layer. We show that the contact resistance area product (R$_c$A) is a benchmark for spin transport properties as it scales with the measured spin lifetime in these devices indicating that contact-induced spin dephasing is the bottleneck for spin transport even in devices with large R$_c$A values. In a second class of devices, Co/MgO electrodes are first patterned onto a silicon substrate. Subsequently, a graphene-hBN heterostructure is directly transferred onto these prepatterned electrodes which provides improved interface properties. This is seen by a strong enhancement of both charge and spin transport properties yielding charge carrier mobilities exceeding 20000 cm$^2$/(Vs) and spin lifetimes up to 3.7 ns at room temperature. We discuss several shortcomings in the determination of both quantities which complicates the analysis of both extrinsic and intrinsic spin scattering mechanisms. Furthermore, we show that contacts can be the origin of a second charge neutrality point in gate dependent resistance measurements which is influenced by the quantum capacitance of the underlying graphene layer.