No Arabic abstract
We report a study of disorder effects on epitaxial graphene in the vicinity of the Dirac point by magneto-transport. Hall effect measurements show that the carrier density increases quadratically with temperature, in good agreement with theoretical predictions which take into account intrinsic thermal excitation combined with electron-hole puddles induced by charged impurities. We deduce disorder strengths in the range 10.2 $sim$ 31.2 meV, depending on the sample treatment. We investigate the scattering mechanisms and estimate the impurity density to be $3.0 sim 9.1 times 10^{10}$ cm$^{-2}$ for our samples. An asymmetry in the electron/hole scattering is observed and is consistent with theoretical calculations for graphene on SiC substrates. We also show that the minimum conductivity increases with increasing disorder potential, in good agreement with quantum-mechanical numerical calculations.
We calculate the temperature dependent conductivity of graphene in the presence of randomly distributed Coulomb impurity charges arising from the temperature dependent screening of the Coulomb disorder without any phonons. The purely electronic temperature dependence of our theory arises from two independent mechanisms: the explicit temperature dependence of the finite temperature dielectric function $epsilon(q,T)$ and the finite temperature energy averaging of the transport scattering time. We find that the calculated temperature dependent conductivity is non-monotonic, decreasing with temperature at low temperatures, and increasing at high temperatures. We provide a critical comparison with the corresponding physics in semiconductor-based parabolic band 2D electron gas 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.
We present temperature-dependent magneto-transport experiments around the charge neutrality point in graphene and determine the amplitude of potential fluctuations $s$ responsible for the formation of electron-hole puddles. The experimental value $s approx 20$ meV is considerably larger than in conventional semiconductors which implies a strong localization of charge carriers observable up to room temperature. Surprisingly, in the quantized regime, the Hall resistivity overshoots the highest plateau values at high temperatures. We demonstrate by model calculations that such a peculiar behavior is expected in any system with coexisting electrons and holes when the energy spectrum is quantized and the carriers are partially localized.
We evaluate the degree of disorder in electrolyte gating devices through the transport measurements in graphene. By comparing the mobility in ion- and standard metal-gated devices, we show that the deposition of the ionic liquid introduces charged impurities with a density of approximately $6times 10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$; setting the upper limit of the mobility in graphene to 3000 cm$^2$/Vs. At higher temperature, phonons in the ionic liquid further reduce the mobility, making its upper limit 2000 cm$^2$/Vs at room temperature. Since the degree of disorder is independent of the base material, these results are valuable towards understanding disorder effects in general devices using electrolyte gating.
We investigate the electron transport through a graphene p-n junction under a perpendicular magnetic field. By using Landauar-Buttiker formalism combining with the non-equilibrium Green function method, the conductance is studied for the clean and disordered samples. For the clean p-n junction, the conductance is quite small. In the presence of disorders, it is strongly enhanced and exhibits plateau structure at suitable range of disorders. Our numerical results show that the lowest plateau can survive for a very broad range of disorder strength, but the existence of high plateaus depends on system parameters and sometimes can not be formed at all. When the disorder is slightly outside of this disorder range, some conductance plateaus can still emerge with its value lower than the ideal value. These results are in excellent agreement with the recent experiment.