Transport Gap Opening and High On–Off Current Ratio in Trilayer Graphene with Self-Aligned Nanodomain Boundaries

• Published in: ACS nano Vol. 9; no. 9; pp. 8967 - 8975
• Main Authors: Wu, Han-Chun, Chaika, Alexander N, Huang, Tsung-Wei, Syrlybekov, Askar, Abid, Mourad, Aristov, Victor Yu, Molodtsova, Olga V, Babenkov, Sergey V, Marchenko, D, Sánchez-Barriga, Jaime, Mandal, Partha Sarathi, Varykhalov, Andrei Yu, Niu, Yuran, Murphy, Barry E, Krasnikov, Sergey A, Lübben, Olaf, Wang, Jing Jing, Liu, Huajun, Yang, Li, Zhang, Hongzhou, Abid, Mohamed, Janabi, Yahya T, Molotkov, Sergei N, Chang, Ching-Ray, Shvets, Igor
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 22.09.2015
• Subjects: Boundaries; Charge transport; Electronics; Engineering and Technology; Feasibility; Graphene; Nano Technology; Nanostructure; Nanoteknik; Scanning tunneling microscopy; Teknik; Transport; nanodomain boundary; scanning tunneling microscopy; transport gap; ARPES; trilayer graphene
• ISSN: 1936-0851; 1936-086X; 1936-086X
• DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b02877

Trilayer graphene exhibits exceptional electronic properties that are of interest both for fundamental science and for technological applications. The ability to achieve a high on–off current ratio is the central question in this field. Here, we propose a simple method to achieve a current on–off ratio of 104 by opening a transport gap in Bernal-stacked trilayer graphene. We synthesized Bernal-stacked trilayer graphene with self-aligned periodic nanodomain boundaries (NBs) on the technologically relevant vicinal cubic-SiC(001) substrate and performed electrical measurements. Our low-temperature transport measurements clearly demonstrate that the self-aligned periodic NBs can induce a charge transport gap greater than 1.3 eV. More remarkably, the transport gap of ∼0.4 eV persists even at 100 K. Our results show the feasibility of creating new electronic nanostructures with high on–off current ratios using graphene on cubic-SiC.