Fabrication of Artificial Graphene in a GaAs Quantum Heterostructure
Abstract
The unusual electronic properties of graphene, which are a direct consequence of its two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb lattice, have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Creation of artificial lattices that recreate graphene's honeycomb topology, known as artificial graphene, can facilitate the investigation of graphene-like phenomena, such as the existence of massless Dirac fermions, in a tunable system. In this work, we present the fabrication of artificial graphene in an ultra-high quality GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well, with lattice period as small as 50 nm, the smallest reported so far for this type of system. Electron-beam lithography is used to define an etch mask with honeycomb geometry on the surface of the sample, and different methodologies are compared and discussed. An optimized anisotropic reactive ion etching process is developed to transfer the pattern into the AlGaAs layer and create the artificial graphene. The achievement of such high-resolution artificial graphene should allow the observation for the first time of massless Dirac fermions in an engineered semiconductor.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.04390,
title = {Fabrication of Artificial Graphene in a GaAs Quantum Heterostructure},
author = {Diego Scarabelli and Sheng Wang and Yuliya Y. Kuznetsova and Loren N. Pfeiffer and Ken West and Geoff C. Gardner and Michael J. Manfra and Vittorio Pellegrini and Aron Pinczuk and Shalom J. Wind},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.04390},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
13 pages text, 8 figures, plus references