Condensed Matter Seminar Series

"Electronic Transport in Disordered Graphene"

Eduardo Mucciolo

University of Central Florida

Thursday January 31,  11:30 am,  Room 298,  Physics Building

Abstract:  During the last two years, graphene has become one of the most exciting new materials for device applications. Yet, much is still not well understood about graphene, especially how its properties are affected by disorder. In this talk, I will review some key aspects of the physics of Dirac fermions in a disordered potential, and then show our recent theoretical results about the dependence of the conductivity and shot noise of graphene sheets on the strength of background potential fluctuations. We have found numerically that the conductivity dependence on the carrier density has a scaling form controlled solely by the disorder strength and the ratio between sample size and correlation length of the disordered potential. We have also found that the shot noise Fano factor dependence on the carrier density is very sensitive to the sheet aspect ratio and in most cases does not follow any universal scaling law. Our approach provides a way for extracting quantitative and qualitative information about microscopic mechanisms of disorder in graphene, with strong implications for device engineering.