Equipartition of current in metallic armchair nanoribbon of graphene-based device

Abstract

We numerically investigate the mesoscopic electronic transport properties of Bernal-stacked bilayer/trilayer graphene connected with four monolayer graphene terminals. In armchair-terminated metallic bilayer graphene, we show that the current from one incoming terminal can be equally partitioned into other three outgoing terminals near the charge-neutrality point, and the conductance periodically fluctuates, which is independent of the ribbon width but influenced by the interlayer hopping energy. This finding can be clearly understood by using the wave function matching method, in which a quantitative relationship between the periodicity, Fermi energy, and interlayer hopping energy can be reached. Interestingly, for the trilayer case, when the Fermi energy is located around the charge-neutrality point, the fractional quantized conductance 1/(4e²h) can be achieved when system exceeds a critical length.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

graphene / electronic transport / armchair nanoribbon

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11974327 and 12004369), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. WK3510000010 and WK2030020032), Anhui Initiative in Quantum Information Technologies (Grant No. AHY170000). We also thank the supercomputing service of AM-HPC and the Supercomputing Center of University of Science and Technology of China for providing the high performance computing resources.

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