Disorder-induced enhancement of transport through graphene p-n junctions

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that disorder can significantly enhance electron transport in graphene p-n junctions, creating conductance plateaus that align with experimental observations, especially under magnetic fields.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis showing how disorder induces conductance plateaus in graphene p-n junctions, extending understanding of transport phenomena under magnetic fields.

Findings

Disorder enhances conductance in graphene p-n junctions.

Conductance plateaus are robust over a broad disorder range.

High conductance plateaus depend on system parameters.

Abstract

We investigate the electron transport through a graphene p-n junction under a perpendicular magnetic field. By using Landauar-Buttiker formalism combining with the non-equilibrium Green function method, the conductance is studied for the clean and disordered samples. For the clean p-n junction, the conductance is quite small. In the presence of disorders, it is strongly enhanced and exhibits plateau structure at suitable range of disorders. Our numerical results show that the lowest plateau can survive for a very broad range of disorder strength, but the existence of high plateaus depends on system parameters and sometimes can not be formed at all. When the disorder is slightly outside of this disorder range, some conductance plateaus can still emerge with its value lower than the ideal value. These results are in excellent agreement with the recent experiment.