Platinum contacts for 9-atom-wide armchair graphene nanoribbons

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the successful transfer of 9-atom-wide armchair graphene nanoribbons onto platinum electrodes, achieving significantly lower contact resistance and providing insights into the electronic properties through combined experimental and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a polymer-free transfer method of GNRs onto platinum electrodes and combines DFT and NEGF calculations to explain the improved contact properties.

Findings

Device resistance reduced by 2-4 orders of magnitude.

Platinum provides strong coupling and higher transmission.

DFT and NEGF explain p-type behavior and contact quality.

Abstract

Creating a good contact between electrodes and graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) has been a longstanding challenge in searching for the next GNR-based nanoelectronics. This quest requires the controlled fabrication of sub-20 nm metallic gaps, a clean GNR transfer minimizing damage and organic contamination during the device fabrication, as well as work function matching to minimize the contact resistance. Here, we transfer 9-atom-wide armchair-edged GNRs (9-AGNRs) grown on Au(111)/mica substrates to pre-patterned platinum electrodes, yielding polymer-free 9-AGNR field-effect transistor devices. Our devices have a resistance in the range of $10^6$ to $10^8$ $\Omega$ in the low-bias regime, which is 2 to 4 orders of magnitude lower than previous reports. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations combined with the non-equilibrium Green's function method (NEGF) explain the observed p-type electrical characteristics and further demonstrate that platinum gives strong coupling and higher transmission in comparison to other materials such as graphene.