Kristiāns Čerņevičs^1,2, Oleg V. Yazyev^1,2, Michele Pizzochero^1,2,3*

1 Institute of Physics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

2 National Centre for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (MARVEL), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

3 School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

* Corresponding authors emails: mpizzochero@g.harvard.edu

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:cd-gr [version v1]

Publication date: Dec 04, 2020

How to cite this record

Kristiāns Čerņevičs, Oleg V. Yazyev, Michele Pizzochero, Electronic transport across quantum dots in graphene nanoribbons: Toward built-in gap-tunable metal-semiconductor-metal heterojunctions, Materials Cloud Archive 2020.159 (2020), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:cd-gr

Description

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.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
QD_data.zip MD5md5:861410d059e48e5baff8d754dd422a9d	63.0 MiB	Data
README.txt MD5md5:b77186d62c0ba3c40259c4ab2c438f3f	926 Bytes	Readme file explaining the folder structure

License

Files and data are licensed under the terms of the following license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Metadata, except for email addresses, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.

External references

Keywords

GNR Graphene Nanoribbon Quantum dot Electronic transport SNSF MARVEL CSCS