Direct observation of a gate tunable band-gap in electrical transport in ABC-trilayer graphene

Abstract

Few layer graphene systems such as Bernal stacked bilayer and rhombohedral (ABC-) stacked trilayer offer the unique possibility to open an electric field tunable energy gap. To date, this energy gap has been experimentally confirmed in optical spectroscopy. Here we report the first direct observation of the electric field tunable energy gap in electronic transport experiments on doubly gated suspended ABC-trilayer graphene. From a systematic study of the non-linearities in current \textit{versus} voltage characteristics and the temperature dependence of the conductivity we demonstrate that thermally activated transport over the energy-gap dominates the electrical response of these transistors. The estimated values for energy gap from the temperature dependence and from the current voltage characteristics follow the theoretically expected electric field dependence with critical exponent $3/2$. These experiments indicate that high quality few-layer graphene are suitable candidates for exploring novel tunable THz light sources and detectors.

Nano Letters, 2015 just accepted, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b00772

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• Landau level splittings, phase transitions, and non-uniform charge distribution in trilayer graphene
• Contact doping, Klein tunneling, and asymmetry of shot noise in suspended graphene
• An integrated and multi-purpose microscope for the characterization of atomically thin optoelectronic devices
• Fano-shaped impurity spectral density, electric-field-induced in-gap state and local magnetic moment of an adatom on trilayer graphene
• Rashba spin splitting based on trilayer graphene systems
• Novel circuit design for high-impedance and non-local electrical measurements of two-dimensional materials