Equipartition of current in metallic armchair nanoribbon of graphene-based device

doi:10.1007/s11467-022-1201-2

Front. Phys.

2022, Vol. 17

Issue (6) : 63508 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1201-2

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Equipartition of current in metallic armchair nanoribbon of graphene-based device

Hui Yang¹, Junjie Zeng¹, Sanyi You¹, Yulei Han²(

), Zhenhua Qiao^1,³(

)

¹. CAS Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics, and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China
². Department of Physics, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China
³. ICQD, Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China

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Abstract

We numerically investigate the mesoscopic electronic transport properties of Bernal-stacked bilayer/trilayer graphene connected with four monolayer graphene terminals. In armchair-terminated metallic bilayer graphene, we show that the current from one incoming terminal can be equally partitioned into other three outgoing terminals near the charge-neutrality point, and the conductance periodically fluctuates, which is independent of the ribbon width but influenced by the interlayer hopping energy. This finding can be clearly understood by using the wave function matching method, in which a quantitative relationship between the periodicity, Fermi energy, and interlayer hopping energy can be reached. Interestingly, for the trilayer case, when the Fermi energy is located around the charge-neutrality point, the fractional quantized conductance 1/(4e²h) can be achieved when system exceeds a critical length.

Keywords graphene electronic transport armchair nanoribbon

Corresponding Author(s): Yulei Han,Zhenhua Qiao

About author:

Tongcan Cui and Yizhe Hou contributed equally to this work.

Issue Date: 28 September 2022

Cite this article:

Hui Yang,Junjie Zeng,Sanyi You, et al. Equipartition of current in metallic armchair nanoribbon of graphene-based device[J]. Front. Phys. , 2022, 17(6): 63508.

URL:

https://academic.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-022-1201-2
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/Y2022/V17/I6/63508

Fig.1 (a) Schematic diagram of the bilayer graphene device. The red part is central scattering region where exits interlayer hopping

t ⊥ = 0.34 e V

. The four blue regions are infinite monolayer graphene reservoirs and current is incident from terminal 1. (b) Graphene nanoribbon with armchair boundary. (c) Side view of

A B A

-stacked trilayer graphene.

Fig.2 Energy bands for graphene nanoribbon with open boundary only in

y

direction. The blue dispersion corresponds to monolayer graphene and the red part describes bilayer graphene bands. (a, b) Nanoribbon with width set to be 20 atoms terminates in armchair boundary. (c, d) Conductance as a function of central scattering length L for armchair terminated bilayer graphene with

E F = 0.339 e V

and

E F = 0.001 e V

. Dashed lines in (d) represent

0.25 G 0

and

0.75 G 0

Fig.3 Probability distribution of wave function as a function of bilayer graphene length x with fixed Fermi energy

E F = 0.001 e V

. (a, b) The central region length are set to be 546a and 663a respectively.

Fig.4 (a) Ribbon band structure of

A B A

-stacked trilayer graphene. Conductance as a function of central scattering length L for armchair terminated trilayer graphene with (b)

E F = 0.001 e V

, (c)

E F = 0.0001 e V

, (d)

E F = 0.00001 e V

. The nanoribbon width is set to be 20 atoms. The dashed blue lines represent

0.25 G 0

and

0.75 G 0

Fig.A1 (a, b) Conductance as a function of central scattering length L for armchair terminated bilayer graphene with

E F = 1 e V

and

E F = 0.4 e V

Fig.A2 Energy bands for graphene nanoribbon with open boundary only in

y

direction. The blue dispersion corresponds to monolayer graphene and the red part describes bilayer graphene bands. (a, b) Nanoribbon with width set to be 20 atoms terminates in zigzag boundary. (c, d) Conductance as a function of central scattering length L for zigzag terminated bilayer graphene with width 20 and 40 atoms.

Fig.5 This is the result obtained from the continuous model. The Fermi energy is 0.001 eV. The maximum value of transmission probability

T 1 i

(

i

=2, 3, 4) is still around 0.25.

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