Electronic Highways in Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

Bilayer graphene with an interlayer potential difference has an energy gap and, when the potential difference varies spatially, topologically protected one-dimensional states localized along the difference's zero-lines. When disorder is absent, electronic travel directions along zero-line trajectories are fixed by valley Hall properties. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formula and the non-equilibrium Green's function technique we demonstrate numerically that collisions between electrons traveling in opposite directions, due to either disorder or changes in path direction, are strongly suppressed. We find that extremely long mean free paths of the order of hundreds of microns can be expected in relatively clean samples. This finding suggests the possibility of designing low power nanoscale electronic devices in which transport paths are controlled by gates which alter the inter-layer potential landscape.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (12)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Biased bilayer graphene: semiconductor with a gap tunable by electric field effect
• Valley filter and valley valve in graphene
• Gate-induced insulating state in bilayer graphene devices
• Asymmetry gap in the electronic band structure of bilayer graphene
• Topological confinement in bilayer graphene
• Edge states in Graphene: from gapped flat band to gapless chiral modes
• Gate-controlled Guiding of Electrons in Graphene
• Electronic transport properties of graphene nanoribbons
• Pseudospin valve in bilayer graphene: towards graphene-based pseudospintronics
• Universal quantized spin-Hall conductance fluctuation in graphene
• Theory of the Pseudospin Resonance in Semiconductor Bilayers