No Arabic abstract
Engineering of cooling mechanisms is a bottleneck in nanoelectronics. Whereas thermal exchanges in diffusive graphene are mostly driven by defect assisted acoustic phonon scattering, the case of high-mobility graphene on hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) is radically different with a prominent contribution of remote phonons from the substrate. A bi-layer graphene on hBN transistor with local gate is driven in a regime where almost perfect current saturation is achieved by compensation of the decrease of the carrier density and Zener-Klein tunneling (ZKT) at high bias. Using noise thermometry, we show that this Zener-Klein tunneling triggers a new cooling pathway due to the emission of hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPP) in hBN by out-of-equilibrium electron-hole pairs beyond the super-Planckian regime. The combination of ZKT-transport and HPP-cooling promotes graphene on BN transistors as a valuable nanotechnology for power devices and RF electronics.
We monitor the Landau-Zener dynamics of a single-ion magnet in a spin-transistor geometry. For increasing field-sweep rates, the spin reversal probability shows increasing deviations from that of a closed system. In the low-conductance limit, such deviations are shown to result from a dephasing process. In particular, the observed behaviors are succesfully simulated by means of an adiabatic master equation, with time averaged dephasing (Lindblad) operators. The time average is tentatively interpeted in terms of the finite time resolution of the continuous measurement.
Spatially nonuniform strain is important for engineering the pseudomagnetic field and band structure of graphene. Despite the wide interest in strain engineering, there is still a lack of control on device-compatible strain patterns due to the limited understanding of the structure-strain relationship. Here, we study the effect of substrate corrugation and curvature on the strain profiles of graphene via combined experimental and theoretical studies of a model system: graphene on closely packed SiO2 nanospheres with different diameters (20-200 nm). Experimentally, via quantitative Raman analysis, we observe partial adhesion and wrinkle features and find that smaller nanospheres induce larger tensile strain in graphene, theoretically, molecular dynamics simulations confirm the same microscopic structure and size dependence of strain and reveal that a larger strain is caused by a stronger, inhomogeneous interaction force between smaller nanospheres and graphene. This molecular-level understanding of the strain mechanism is important for strain engineering of graphene and other two-dimensional materials.
We explore the dependence of electrical transport in a graphene field effect transistor (GraFET) on the flow of the liquid within the immediate vicinity of that transistor. We find large and reproducible shifts in the charge neutrality point of GraFETs that are dependent on the fluid velocity and the ionic concentration. We show that these shifts are consistent with the variation of the local electrochemical potential of the liquid next to graphene that are caused by the fluid flow (streaming potential). Furthermore, we utilize the sensitivity of electrical transport in GraFETs to the parameters of the fluid flow to demonstrate graphene-based mass flow and ionic concentration sensing. We successfully detect a flow as small as~70nL/min, and detect a change in the ionic concentration as small as ~40nM.
We model the optical visibility of monolayer and bilayer graphene deposited on a silicon/silicon oxide substrate or thermally annealed on the surface of silicon carbide. We consider reflection and transmission setups, and find that visibility is strongest in reflection reaching the optimum conditions when the bare substrate transmits light resonantly. In the optical range of frequencies a bilayer is approximately twice as visible as a monolayer thereby making the two types of graphene distinguishable from each other.
The hyperbolic phonon-polaritons within the Reststrahlen band of hBN are of great interest for applications in nanophotonics as they are capable of propagating light signals with low losses over large distances. However, due to the phononic nature of the polaritons in hBN, amplitude modulation of its signal proves to be difficult and has been underexplored. In this paper, we propose theoretically a broadband efficient amplitude modulator for hyperbolic rays in hBN operating in the frequency range between 1450 cm$^{-1}$ and 1550 cm$^{-1}$. The modulating region comprises a few tens of nanometers wide gap carved within the hBN slab and covered by a graphene layer, where electrostatically gated graphene serves as a mediator that facilitates the coupling between phonon-polaritons on each side of the gap through plasmonic modes within graphene. We demonstrate that such an ultra compact modulator has insertion losses as low as 3 dB and provides modulation depth varying between 14 and 20 dB within the type-II hyperbolicity region of hBN.