Electronic transport across realistic grain boundaries in graphene

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how the morphology of disordered grain boundaries in graphene affects electronic transport, revealing a relationship between transmission and misorientation angle.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive simulation approach to model realistic disordered grain boundaries and links their topological features to transport properties.

Findings

Transmission decreases with lower misorientation angles in low-angle regime.

Disordered GBs exhibit similar conductance trends as periodic GBs.

Results provide data for understanding polycrystalline graphene transport.

Abstract

We perform a MonteCarlo simulation in order to study the connection between the morphology and the transport properties of grain boundaries (GBs) in graphene. We explore the configurational space of GBs to generate ensembles of realistic models of disordered interfaces between graphene misoriented domains. Among other observables, transmission across GBs has been probed all along the simulation, thus making us able to establish a connection between averaged transmission and the topological invariant of GBs, the misorientation angle. We extend to disordered GBs the remarkable result that the low angle regime is characterized by a decrease of the individual GB conductance upon a reduction of the angle, as first found for periodic GBs. However, we explored a comprehensive range of misorientation angles such that our results should serve as a starting data set to study the effect of polycrystallicity on transport in large samples.