Spatial mapping of disordered 2D materials: the conductance Sudoku

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel inversion method, inspired by Sudoku puzzles, to map impurity distributions in disordered 2D materials like graphene using conductance measurements from multi-terminal setups.

Contribution

It adapts an inversion technique to a multi-terminal configuration, enabling detailed spatial impurity mapping in 2D materials based on conductance data.

Findings

Method can resolve impurity distributions with variable spatial resolution

Electrode geometry influences the spatial resolution of impurity mapping

The approach offers an alternative way to analyze disordered materials

Abstract

Motivated by recent advances on local conductance measurement techniques at the nanoscale, timely questions are being raised about what possible information can be extracted from a disordered graphene sheet by selectively interrogating its transport properties. Here we demonstrate how an inversion technique originally developed to identify the number of scatterers in a quantum device can be adapted to a multi-terminal setup in order to provide detailed information about the spatial distribution of impurities on the surface of graphene, as well as other 2D material systems. The methodology input are conductance readings (for instance, as a function of the chemical potential) between different electrode pairs, the output being the spatially resolved impurity density. We discuss how the obtained spatial resolution depends on the number of such readings and on the electrode geometry. Furthermore, by separating the impurity locations into partitions arranged in a grid-like geometry, this inversion procedure resembles a Sudoku puzzle in which the compositions of different sectors of a device are found by imposing that they must add up to specific constrained values established for the grid rows and columns. We argue that this technique may provide alternative new ways of extracting information from a disordered material through the selective probing of local quantities.