Electronic transport in polycrystalline graphene.

By O. Yazyev, Steven G. Louie. Nature Materials, 2010

875 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most materials in available macroscopic quantities are polycrystalline. Graphene, a recently discovered two-dimensional form of carbon with strong potential for replacing silicon in future electronics, is no exception. There is growing evidence of the polycrystalline nature of graphene samples obtained using various techniques. Grain boundaries, intrinsic topological defects of polycrystalline materials, are expected to markedly alter the electronic transport in graphene. Here, we develop a theory of charge carrier transmission through grain boundaries composed of a periodic array of dislocations in graphene based on the momentum conservation principle. Depending on the grain-boundary structure we find two distinct transport behaviours--either high transparency, or perfect reflection of charge carriers over remarkably large energy ranges. First-principles quantum transport calculations are used to verify and further investigate this striking behaviour. Our study sheds light on the transport properties of large-area graphene samples. Furthermore, purposeful engineering of periodic grain boundaries with tunable transport gaps would allow for controlling charge currents without the need to introduce bulk bandgaps in otherwise semimetallic graphene. The proposed approach can be regarded as a means towards building practical graphene electronics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/422f7e24ccc54cfb77b3d6805752d377c6d728f4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Volker Blum
2. Zhihong Liu
3. Hui‐Ming Cheng
4. Q. Fu
5. R. Young
6. A. Krasheninnikov
7. Lin Lin
8. D. Papageorgiou

In Materials Chemistry

1. Hui‐Ming Cheng
2. S. Pei
3. D. Papageorgiou
4. I. Kinloch
5. A. Krasheninnikov
6. W. Ren
7. F. Banhart
8. Huajian Gao

Citations in the corpus

• Control and characterization of individual grains and grain boundaries in graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition. (2010, background): “However, the large-scale synthetic graphene films produced so far are typically polycrystalline”
• Repeated growth and bubbling transfer of graphene with millimetre-size single-crystal grains using platinum (2012, background): “There is increasing evidence of the polycrystalline nature of graphene prepared by various growth method”
• Siesta: Recent developments and applications. (2020, background): “To list a few examples, the magnetic properties of impurities, 165,166 and edges 167 , but also electronic properties, including transport characteristics, in grain boundaries 168,169 , ribbons 170 , nanoporous graphene 171 , large graphene flakes 68,172 , or the effect of substrates 173 .”
• Experimental Review of Graphene (2011, background): “Preliminary studies suggested that grain boundaries (Yazyev and Louie, 2010), doping defects (Wei et al., 2009) and ineffective gate voltage control (Cao et al., 2010) might limit the mobility.”
• Graphene/elastomer nanocomposites (2015, methodology): “Transmission electron microscopy has also been employed to determine the size of different grains or the atomic structure of grain boundaries, since these features are associated with the electronic [71], magnetic [72] and mechanical [73] properties of the material [74,75].”
• Structural defects in graphene. (2011, background): “The electronic structure of graphene with point and line defects has been studied in a considerable number of papers.(5,17,73,101,105,106) Point defects give rise to localized states near the Fermi energy in sp(2)-bonded materials, leading to the protrusions that appear in STM images.”