Disorder information from conductance: a quantum inverse problem

Abstract

It is straightforward to calculate the conductance of a quantum device once all its scattering centers are fully specified. However, to do this in reverse, i.e., to find information about the composition of scatterers in a device from its conductance, is an elusive task. This is particularly more challenging in the presence of disorder. Here we propose a procedure in which valuable compositional information can be extracted from the seemingly noisy spectral conductance of a two-terminal disordered quantum device. In particular, we put forward an inversion methodology that can identify the nature and respective concentration of randomly-distributed impurities by analyzing energy-dependent conductance fingerprints. Results are shown for graphene nanoribbons as a case in point using both tight-binding and density functional theory simulations, indicating that this inversion technique is general, robust and can be employed to extract structural and compositional information of disordered mesoscopic devices from standard conductance measurements.

References in corpus (6)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Wannier90 as a community code: new features and applications
• Tailoring the atomic structure of graphene nanoribbons by STM lithography
• Z2Pack: Numerical Implementation of Hybrid Wannier Centers for Identifying Topological Materials
• KITE: high-performance accurate modelling of electronic structure and response functions of large molecules, disordered crystals and heterostructures
• Tree based machine learning framework for predicting ground state energies of molecules

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Turbulence Hierarchy and Multifractality in the Integer Quantum Hall Transition
• Spatial mapping of disordered 2D materials: the conductance Sudoku
• Decoding the DC and optical conductivities of disordered MoS${}_2$ films: an inverse problem
• Decoding the conductance of disordered nanostructures: a quantum inverse problem
• Inverse determination of light-matter coupling in disordered systems from transmittance spectra