No Arabic abstract
We study the transport of charge carriers through finite graphene structures. The use of numerical exact kernel polynomial and Green function techniques allows us to treat actual sized samples beyond the Dirac-cone approximation. Particularly we investigate disordered nanoribbons, normal-conductor/graphene interfaces and normal-conductor/graphene/normal-conductor junctions with a focus on the behavior of the local density of states, single-particle spectral function, optical conductivity and conductance. We demonstrate that the contacts and bulk disorder will have a major impact on the electronic properties of graphene-based devices.
Metallic atomic junctions pose the ultimate limit to the scaling of electrical contacts. They serve as model systems to probe electrical and thermal transport down to the atomic level as well as quantum effects occurring in one-dimensional systems. Charge transport in atomic junctions has been studied intensively in the last two decades. However, heat transport remains poorly characterized because of significant experimental challenges. Specifically the combination of high sensitivity to small heat fluxes and the formation of stable atomic contacts has been a major hurdle for the development of this field. Here we report on the realization of heat transfer measurements through atomic junctions and analyze the thermal conductance of single atomic gold contacts at room temperature. Simultaneous measurements of charge and heat transport reveal the proportionality of electrical and thermal conductance, quantized with the respective conductance quanta. This constitutes an atomic scale verification of the well-known Wiedemann-Franz law. We anticipate that our findings will be a major advance in enabling the investigation of heat transport properties in molecular junctions, with meaningful implications towards the manipulation of heat at the nanoscale
The electronic states of an electrostatically confined cylindrical graphene quantum dot and the electric transport through this device are studied theoretically within the continuum Dirac-equation approximation and compared with numerical results obtained from a tight-binding lattice description. A spectral gap, which may originate from strain effects, additional adsorbed atoms or substrate-induced sublattice-symmetry breaking, allows for bound and scattering states. As long as the diameter of the dot is much larger than the lattice constant, the results of the continuum and the lattice model are in very good agreement. We also investigate the influence of a sloping dot-potential step, of on-site disorder along the sample edges, of uncorrelated short-range disorder potentials in the bulk, and of random magnetic-fluxes that mimic ripple-disorder. The quantum dots spectral and transport properties depend crucially on the specific type of disorder. In general, the peaks in the density of bound states are broadened but remain sharp only in the case of edge disorder.
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.
We report on quantum transport measurements on etched graphene nanoribbons encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). At zero magnetic field our devices behave qualitatively very similar to what has been reported for graphene nanoribbons on $text{SiO}_2$ or hBN, but exhibit a considerable smaller transport gap. At magnetic fields of around $3~$T the transport behavior changes considerably and is dominated by a much larger energy gap induced by electron-electron interactions completely suppressing transport. This energy gap increases with a slope on the order of $3-4~ $meV/T reaching values of up to $ 30~mathrm{meV} $ at $ 9~ $T.
Chemically synthesized cove-type graphene nanoribbons (cGNRs) of different widths were brought into dispersion and drop-cast onto exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) on a Si/SiO2 chip. With AFM we observed that the cGNRs form ordered domains aligned along the crystallographic axes of the hBN. Using electron beam lithography and metallization, we contacted the cGNRs with NiCr/Au, or Pd contacts and measured their I-V-characteristics. The transport through the ribbons was dominated by the Schottky behavior of the contacts between the metal and the ribbon.