Effective contact model for transport through weakly-doped graphene

TL;DR

This paper introduces an effective contact model that simplifies the study of charge transport in weakly-doped graphene systems, revealing a duality with metallic leads and enabling efficient analysis of extended graphene structures.

Contribution

It presents a new, simplified contact model that captures transport properties in weakly-doped graphene, extending the understanding of lead-graphene interactions.

Findings

Transport properties are identical for graphitic and metallic leads due to mode selection.

The duality between graphitic and metallic leads is based on transverse momentum near K points.

The effective contact model simplifies analysis of transport in extended weakly-doped graphene systems.

Abstract

Recent investigations address transport through ballistic charge-neutral graphene strips coupled to doped graphitic leads. This paper shows that identical transport properties arise when the leads are replaced by quantum wires. This duality between graphitic and metallic leads originates in the selection of modes with transverse momentum close to the K points, and can be extended to a wide class of contact models. Among this class we identify a simple, effective contact model, which provides an efficient tool to study the transport through extended weakly-doped graphitic systems.