Theory of the valley-valve effect in graphene nanoribbons

By A. Akhmerov, J. Bardarson, A. Rycerz, C. Beenakker. 2007

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A potential step in a graphene nanoribbon with zigzag edges is shown to be an intrinsic source of intervalley scattering -- no matter how smooth the step is on the scale of the lattice constant a. The valleys are coupled by a pair of localized states at the opposite edges, which act as an attractor/repellor for edge states propagating in valley K/K'. The relative displacement Delta along the ribbon of the localized states determines the conductance G. Our result G=(e^{2}/h)[1-\cos(N\pi+2\pi\Delta/3a)] explains why the ``valley-valve'' effect (the blocking of the current by a p-n junction) depends on the parity of the number N of carbon atoms across the ribbon.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71a25f21b6688d8cb5744c2c151241093c261d8f

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Electronic properties of mesoscopic graphene structures: Charge confinement and control of spin and charge transport (2011, background): “Hereafter, we focus on low-energy excitations when the inter-valley scattering [211] is negligible and quasiparticles can be considered as massless Dirac fermions.”
Charge transport in disordered graphene-based low dimensional materials (2008, background): “This effect depends critically on the parity of the number of zigzag chains across the ribbons [51] and has been successfully explained by realizing that, in case of even-indexed zGNRs, the symmetry of the ribbons is preserved by the considered superimposed potential, thus forbidding potential-induc”