Edge disorder induced Anderson localization and conduction gap in graphene nanoribbons

Abstract

We study the effect of the edge disorder on the conductance of the graphene nanoribbons (GNRs). We find that only very modest edge disorder is sufficient to induce the conduction energy gap in the otherwise metallic GNRs and to lift any difference in the conductance between nanoribbons of different edge geometry. We relate the formation of the conduction gap to the pronounced edge disorder induced Anderson-type localization which leads to the strongly enhanced density of states at the edges, formation of surface-like states and to blocking of conductive paths through the ribbons.

References in corpus (6)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Detection of Individual Gas Molecules Absorbed on Graphene
• Graphene Nano-Ribbon Electronics
• Carrier transport in 2D graphene layers
• Quantum conductance of graphene nanoribbons with edge defects
• Transport regimes in surface disordered graphene sheets

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Charge Transport in Disordered Graphene-Based Low Dimensional Materials
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• Transport gap in side-gated graphene constrictions
• Chemically-induced Mobility Gaps in Graphene Nanoribbons: A Route for Upscaling Device Performances
• Boundary problems for Dirac electrons and edge-assisted Raman scattering in graphene
• Interfaces Within Graphene Nanoribbons
• Dirac fermion quantization on graphene edges: Isospin-orbit coupling, zero modes and spontaneous valley polarization