No Arabic abstract
The quantum transport formalism based on tight-binding models is known to be powerful in dealing with a wide range of open physical systems subject to external driving forces but is, at the same time, limited by the memory requirements increasing with the number of atomic sites in the scattering region. Here we demonstrate how to achieve an accurate simulation of quantum transport feasible for experimentally sized bulk graphene heterojunctions at a strongly reduced computational cost. Without free tuning parameters, we show excellent agreement with a recent experiment on Klein backscattering [A. F. Young and P. Kim, Nature Phys. 5, 222 (2009)].
We calculate quantum transport for metal-graphene nanoribbon heterojunctions within the atomistic self-consistent Schrodinger/Poisson scheme. Attention is paid on both the chemical aspects of the interface bonding as well the one-dimensional electrostatics along the ribbon length. Band-bending and doping effects strongly influence the transport properties, giving rise to conductance asymmetries and a selective suppression of the subband formation. Junction electrostatics and p-type characteristics drive the conduction mechanism in the case of high work function Au, Pd and Pt electrodes, while contact resistance becomes dominant in the case of Al.
We fabricate a graphene p-n-p heterojunction and exploit the coherence of weakly-confined Dirac quasiparticles to resolve the underlying scattering potential using low temperature scanning gate microscopy. The tip-induced perturbation to the heterojunction modifies the condition for resonant scattering, enabling us to detect localized Fabry-Perot cavities from the focal point of halos in scanning gate images. In addition to halos over the bulk we also observe ones spatially registered to the physical edge of the graphene. Guided by quantum transport simulations we attribute these to modified resonant scattering at the edges within elongated cavities that form due to focusing of the electrostatic field.
The success of all-graphene electronics is severely hindered by the challenging realization and subsequent integration of semiconducting channels and metallic contacts. Here, we comprehensively investigate the electronic transport across width-modulated heterojunctions consisting of a graphene quantum dot of varying lengths and widths embedded in a pair of armchair-edged metallic nanoribbons, of the kind recently fabricated via on-surface synthesis. We show that the presence of the quantum dot enables the opening of a width-dependent transport gap, thereby yielding built-in one-dimensional metal-semiconductor-metal junctions. Furthermore, we find that, in the vicinity of the band edges, the conductance is subject to a smooth transition from an antiresonant to a resonant transport regime upon increasing the channel length. These results are rationalized in terms of a competition between quantum-confinement effects and quantum dot-to-lead coupling. Overall, our work establishes graphene quantum dot nanoarchitectures as appealing platforms to seamlessly integrate gap-tunable semiconducting channels and metallic contacts into an individual nanoribbon, hence realizing self-contained carbon-based electronic devices.
We propose a method of measuring the electron temperature $T_e$ in mesoscopic conductors and demonstrate experimentally its applicability to micron-size graphene devices in the linear-response regime ($T_eapprox T$, the bath temperature). The method can be {especially useful} in case of overheating, $T_e>T$. It is based on analysis of the correlation function of mesoscopic conductance fluctuations. Although the fluctuation amplitude strongly depends on the details of electron scattering in graphene, we show that $T_e$ extracted from the correlation function is insensitive to these details.
We report simultaneous transport and scanning microwave impedance microscopy to examine the correlation between transport quantization and filling of the bulk Landau levels in the quantum Hall regime in gated graphene devices. Surprisingly, a comparison of these measurements reveals that quantized transport typically occurs below the complete filling of bulk Landau levels, when the bulk is still conductive. This result points to a revised understanding of transport quantization when carriers are accumulated by gating. We discuss the implications on transport study of the quantum Hall effect in graphene and related topological states in other two-dimensional electron systems.