Conductivity of graphene on boron nitride substrates

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the conductivity of graphene on boron nitride substrates, showing how high-quality interfaces suppress impurity scattering and enhance mobility, aligning with experimental data.

Contribution

It offers a quantitative estimate of disorder strength in graphene on h-BN and compares theoretical predictions with recent experimental results.

Findings

High mobility of graphene on h-BN due to suppressed impurity scattering

Quantitative estimates of disorder strength in graphene on h-BN

Good interface quality reduces charged impurity effects

Abstract

We calculate theoretically the disorder-limited conductivity of monolayer and bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) substrates, comparing our theoretical results with the recent experimental results. The comparison leads to a direct quantitative estimate of the underlying disorder strength for both short-range and long-range disorder in the graphene on h-BN system. We find that the good interface quality between graphene and h-BN leads to strongly suppressed charged impurity scattering compared with the corresponding SiO$_2$ substrate case, thus producing very high mobility for the graphene on h-BN system.