Effect of contact induced states on minimum conductivity in graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates how contact-induced states influence the minimum conductivity in graphene, revealing that these states penetrate deeply and affect resistance measurements, which is crucial for interpreting experimental results.

Contribution

It demonstrates that contact-induced states in graphene penetrate much farther than in typical semiconductors, significantly impacting the observed minimum conductivity and its dependence on device structure.

Findings

Contact induced states penetrate graphene over a distance comparable to contact width.

Ballistic graphene can show length-dependent resistance due to contact effects.

Minimum conductivity varies with device configuration and structure.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to point out that contact induced states can help explain the structure dependence of the minimum conductivity observed experimentally even if the samples were purely ballistic. Contact induced states are similar to the well-known metal induced gap states (MIGS) in metal-semiconductor Schottky junctions, which typically penetrate only a few atomic lengths into the semiconductor, while the depth of penetration decreases with increasing band gap. However, in graphene we find that these states penetrate a much longer distance of the order of the width of the contacts. As a result, ballistic graphene samples with a length less than their width can exhibit a resistance proportional to length that is not Ohmic in origin, but arises from a reduced role of contact-induced states. While actual samples are probably not ballistic and involve scattering processes, our results show that these contact induced effects need to be taken into account in interpreting experiments and minimum conductivity depends strongly on the structure and configuration (two- vs. four-terminal) used.