A Guide to the Design of Electronic Properties of Graphene Nanoribbons

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how the atomic structure and interactions in graphene nanoribbons can be manipulated to engineer their diverse and tunable electronic properties for technological applications.

Contribution

It offers a pedagogical guide to understanding and designing GNRs with specific electronic behaviors based on their structural degrees of freedom.

Findings

GNRs can exhibit metallic, semiconducting, and topologically non-trivial phases.

Electronic properties of GNRs are highly tunable through structural modifications.

The paper outlines strategies for designing GNRs with desired electronic features.

Abstract

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are one-dimensional nanostructures predicted to display a rich variety of electronic behaviors. Depending on their structure, GNRs realize metallic and semiconducting electronic structures with band gaps that can be tuned across broad ranges. Certain GNRs also exhibit a peculiar gapped magnetic phase for which the half-metallic state can be induced as well as the topologically non-trivial quantum spin Hall electronic phase. Because their electronic properties are highly tunable, GNRs have quickly become a popular subject of research toward the design of graphene-based nanostructures for technological applications. This Account presents a pedagogical overview of the various degrees of freedom in the atomic structure and interactions that researchers can use to tailor the electronic structure of these materials. The Account provides a broad picture of relevant physical concepts that would facilitate the rational design of GNRs with desired electronic properties through synthetic techniques.