Landauer-B\"uttiker conductivity for spatially-dependent uniaxial strained armchair-terminated graphene nanoribbons

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to calculate the Landauer-Büttiker conductivity in armchair graphene nanoribbons under spatially varying uniaxial strain, revealing how different strain wavelengths affect electronic transport properties.

Contribution

It introduces a transfer matrix approach for uniaxial spatially dependent strain in graphene nanoribbons and analyzes the impact of sinusoidal strain fields on conductivity.

Findings

Larger wavelength strain reduces conductivity compared to unstrained case.

Smaller wavelength strain significantly modifies conductivity.

Near the Dirac point, conductivity remains similar to unstrained graphene.

Abstract

The Landauer-B\"uttiker conductivity of arbitrary uniaxial spatially dependent strain in an armchair graphene nanoribbon is studied. Due to the uniaxial character of the strain, the corresponding transfer matrix can be reduced to a product of $2\times2$ matrices. Then the conductivity and the Fano factor can be calculated from this product. As an example of the technique, sinusoidal space dependent strain fields are studied using two different strain wavelengths. For the bigger wavelength the conductivity is reduced when compared with the unstrained case, although both conductivities are almost the same in shape. Whereas, for the smaller wavelength case, the conductivity is strongly modified. In spite of this, for energies close to the Dirac point energy, the conductivity and the Fano factor are quite similar to their unstrained counterpart for the two strain wavelengths here studied.