Electronic transport across quantum dots in graphene nanoribbons: Toward built-in gap-tunable metal-semiconductor-metal heterojunctions

The success of all-graphene electronics is severely hindered by the challenging realization and subsequent integration of semiconducting channels and metallic contacts. Here, we comprehensively investigate the electronic transport across width-modulated heterojunctions consisting of a graphene quantum dot of varying lengths and widths embedded in a pair of armchair-edged metallic nanoribbons, of the kind recently fabricated via on-surface synthesis. We show that the presence of the quantum dot enables the opening of a width-dependent transport gap, thereby yielding built-in one-dimensional metal-semiconductor-metal junctions. Furthermore, we find that, in the vicinity of the band edges, the conductance is subject to a smooth transition from an antiresonant to a resonant transport regime upon increasing the channel length. These results are rationalized in terms of a competition between quantum-confinement effects and quantum dot-to-lead coupling. Overall, our work establishes graphene quantum dot nanoarchitectures as appealing platforms to seamlessly integrate gap-tunable semiconducting channels and metallic contacts into an individual nanoribbon, hence realizing self-contained carbon-based electronic devices.

Identifier
Source https://archive.materialscloud.org/record/2020.159
Metadata Access https://archive.materialscloud.org/xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:materialscloud.org:657
Provenance
Creator Čerņevičs, Kristiāns; Yazyev, Oleg V.; Pizzochero, Michele
Publisher Materials Cloud
Publication Year 2020
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
OpenAccess true
Contact archive(at)materialscloud.org
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Materials Science and Engineering