Interface of graphene nanopore and hexagonal boron nitride as a sensing device

Abstract

The atomically-precise controlled synthesis of graphene stripes embedded in hexagonal boron nitride opens up new possibilities for the construction of nanodevices with applications in sensing. Here, we explore properties related to electronic structure and quantum transport of a graphene nanoroad embedded in hexagonal boron nitride, using a combination of density functional theory and the non-equilibrium Green's functions method to calculate the electric conductance. We find that the graphene nanoribbon signature is preserved in the transmission spectra and that the local current is mainly confined to the graphene domain. When a properly sized nanopore is created in the graphene part of the system, the electronic current becomes restricted to a carbon chain running along the border with hexagonal boron nitride. This circumstance could allow the hypothetical nanodevice to become highly sensitive to the electronic nature of molecules passing through the nanopore, thus opening up ways for the detection of gas molecules, amino acids, or even DNA sequences based on a measurement of the real-time conductance modulation in the graphene nanoroad.

References in corpus (12)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Two-Dimensional Gas of Massless Dirac Fermions in Graphene
• The SIESTA method for ab initio order-N materials simulation
• Efficient index handling of multidimensional periodic boundary conditions
• Density functional method for nonequilibrium electron transport
• BN white graphene with `colorful' edges--the energies and morphology
• Transmission eigenchannels from non-equilibrium Green's functions
• Electrochemical reaction in single layer MoS2: nanopores opened atom by atom
• Physisorption of DNA nucleobases on h-BN and graphene: vdW-corrected DFT calculations
• Transverse conductance of DNA nucleotides in a graphene nanogap from first principles
• Silicene as a new ultrafast DNA sequencing device
• Transport Properties of Graphene Nanoroads in Boron-Nitride Sheets