We study the electronic properties of h-BN/graphene/h-BN ABC-stacked trilayer systems using tight binding and DFT methods. We comment on the recent work of Ramasubramaniam et al. (arxiv:1011.2489) whose results seem to be in disagreement with our recent calculations. Detailed analysis reaffirms our previous conclusions.
Bandgap engineering by substituting C with B and N atoms in graphene has been shown to be a promising way to improve semiconducting properties of graphene. Such hybridized monolayers consisting of hexagonal BN phases in graphene (h-BNC) have been rec
ently synthesized and char- acterized. In this paper, we present an ab initio density functional theory (DFT)-based study of h-BN domain size effect on band gap of mono-layer h-BNC heterostructures. The atomic structures, electronic band structures, density of states and electron localization functions of five h-BNC config- urations are examined as h-BN concentration ranged from 0 to 100%. We report that the band gap energy of h-BNC can be continuously and quadratically tuned as a function of h-BN concentration.
The role of defects in van der Waals heterostructures made of graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is studied by a combination of ab initio and model calculations. Despite the weak van der Waals interaction between layers, defects residing in
h-BN, such as carbon impurities and antisite defects, reveal a hybridization with graphene p$_{rm z}$ states, leading to midgap state formation. The induced midgap states modify the transport properties of graphene and can be reproduced by means of a simple effective tight-binding model. In contrast to carbon defects, it is found that oxygen defects do not strongly hybridize with graphenes low-energy states. Instead, oxygen drastically modifies the band gap of graphene, which emerges in a commensurate stacking on h-BN lattices.
We investigated a suspended bilayer graphene where the bottom (top) layer is doped by boron (nitrogen) substitutional atoms by using Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations. We found that at high dopant concentration (one B-N pair every 32 C ato
ms) the electronic structure of the bilayer does not depend on the B-N distance but on the relative occupation of the bilayer graphene sub-lattices by B and N. We found that a large built in electric field is established between layers, giving rise to an energy gap. We further investigated the transport properties and found that intra-layer electron current is weakly influenced by the presence of these dopants while the inter-layer current is significantly enhanced for biases allowing the energy alignment of N and B states. This effect leads to current rectification in asymmetric junctions.
We report the infrared transmission measurement on electrically gated twisted bilayer graphene. The optical absorption spectrum clearly manifests the dramatic changes such as the splitting of inter-linear-band absorption step, the shift of inter-van
Hove singularity transition peak, and the emergence of very strong intra-valence (intra-conduction) band transition. These anomalous optical behaviors demonstrate consistently the non-rigid band structure modification created by the ion-gel gating through the layer-dependent Coulomb screening. We propose that this screening-driven band modification is an universal phenomenon that persists to other bilayer crystals in general, establishing the electrical gating as a versatile technique to engineer the band structures and to create new types of optical absorptions that can be exploited in electro-optical device application.
We demonstrate gate-tunable resonant tunneling and negative differential resistance in the interlayer current-voltage characteristics of rotationally aligned double bilayer graphene heterostructures separated by hexagonal boron-nitride (hBN) dielectr
ic. An analysis of the heterostructure band alignment using individual layer densities, along with experimentally determined layer chemical potentials indicates that the resonance occurs when the energy bands of the two bilayer graphene are aligned. We discuss the tunneling resistance dependence on the interlayer hBN thickness, as well as the resonance width dependence on mobility and rotational alignment.