Transport in disordered graphene nanoribbons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how edge roughness affects electronic transport in graphene nanoribbons, revealing that disorder induces a one-dimensional hopping mechanism influencing conductivity.

Contribution

It introduces a model for weak boundary disorder and provides numerical evidence for similar effects under strong uncorrelated boundary disorder in graphene nanoribbons.

Findings

Low-temperature conductivity governed by one-dimensional hopping.

Edge disorder causes effective band structure segmentation.

Similar transport behavior observed in weak and strong disorder regimes.

Abstract

We study electronic transport in graphene nanoribbons with rough edges. We first consider a model of weak disorder that corresponds to an armchair ribbon whose width randomly changes by a single unit cell size. We find that in this case, the low-temperature conductivity is governed by an effective one-dimensional hopping between segments of distinct band structure. We then provide numerical evidence and qualitative arguments that similar behavior also occurs in the limit of strong uncorrelated boundary disorder.