Publishes on Graphene research and applications, Plasmonic and Surface Plasmon Research, Quantum and electron transport phenomena. 315 papers and 58.4k citations.
This article reviews the basic theoretical aspects of graphene, a one-atom-thick allotrope of carbon, with unusual two-dimensional Dirac-like electronic excitations. The Dirac electrons can be controlled by application of external electric and magnetic fields, or by altering sample geometry and/or topology. The Dirac electrons behave in unusual ways in tunneling, confinement, and the integer quantum Hall effect. The electronic properties of graphene stacks are discussed and vary with stacking order and number of layers. Edge (surface) states in graphene depend on the edge termination (zigzag or armchair) and affect the physical properties of nanoribbons. Different types of disorder modify the Dirac equation leading to unusual spectroscopic and transport properties. The effects of electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions in single layer and multilayer graphene are also presented.
There are few phenomena in condensed matter physics that are defined only by the fundamental constants and do not depend on material parameters. Examples are the resistivity quantum, h/e2 (h is Planck's constant and e the electron charge), that appears in a variety of transport experiments and the magnetic flux quantum, h/e, playing an important role in the physics of superconductivity. By and large, sophisticated facilities and special measurement conditions are required to observe any of these phenomena. We show that the opacity of suspended graphene is defined solely by the fine structure constant, a = e2/hc feminine 1/137 (where c is the speed of light), the parameter that describes coupling between light and relativistic electrons and that is traditionally associated with quantum electrodynamics rather than materials science. Despite being only one atom thick, graphene is found to absorb a significant (pa = 2.3%) fraction of incident white light, a consequence of graphene's unique electronic structure.
Tunnel Barriers for Graphene Transistors Transistor operation for integrated circuits not only requires that the gate material has high-charge carrier mobility, but that there is also an effective way of creating a barrier to current flow so that the device can be switched off and not waste power. Graphene offers high carrier mobility, but the shape of its conduction and valence bands enables electron tunneling and makes it difficult to achieve low currents in an “off” state. Britnell et al. (p. 947 , published online 2 February) have fabricated field-effect transistors in which a thin tunneling barrier created from a layered material—either hexagonal boron nitride or molybdenum disulfide—is sandwiched between graphene sheets. These devices exhibit on-off switching ratios of ≈50 and ≈10,000, respectively, at room temperature.
We demonstrate that the electronic gap of a graphene bilayer can be controlled externally by applying a gate bias. From the magnetotransport data (Shubnikov-de Haas measurements of the cyclotron mass), and using a tight-binding model, we extract the value of the gap as a function of the electronic density. We show that the gap can be changed from zero to midinfrared energies by using fields of less, approximately < 1 V/nm, below the electric breakdown of SiO2. The opening of a gap is clearly seen in the quantum Hall regime.
We consider a graphene bilayer with a relative small angle rotation between the layers--a stacking defect often seen in the surface of graphite--and calculate the electronic structure near zero energy in a continuum approximation. Contrary to what happens in an AB stacked bilayer and in accord with observations in epitaxial graphene, we find: (a) the low energy dispersion is linear, as in a single layer, but the Fermi velocity can be significantly smaller than the single-layer value; (b) an external electric field, perpendicular to the layers, does not open an electronic gap.