Electronic transport in graphene: A semi-classical approach including midgap states

TL;DR

This paper uses a semi-classical Boltzmann approach to analyze graphene's electronic transport, introducing midgap states as an additional scattering mechanism to explain experimental mobility and conductivity behaviors.

Contribution

It proposes a new scattering mechanism involving midgap states that better explains experimental observations in graphene's conductivity.

Findings

Midgap states significantly affect graphene's conductivity.

The model reproduces sublinear conductivity versus gate voltage.

Temperature-dependent scattering due to acoustic phonons is discussed.

Abstract

Using the semi-classical Boltzmann theory, we calculate the conductivity as function of the carrier density. As usually, we include the scattering from charged impurities, but conclude that the estimated impurity density is too low in order to explain the experimentally observed mobilities. We thus propose an additional scattering mechanism involving midgap states which leads to a similar k-dependence of the relaxation time as charged impurities. The new scattering mechanism can account for the experimental findings such as the sublinear behavior of the conductivity versus gate voltage and the increase of the minimal conductivity for clean samples. We also discuss temperature dependent scattering due to acoustic phonons.