Quantum confined electronic states in atomically well-defined graphene nanostructures
Abstract
Despite the enormous interest in the properties of graphene and the potential of graphene nanostructures in electronic applications, the study of quantum confined states in atomically well-defined graphene nanostructures remains an experimental challenge. Here, we study graphene quantum dots (GQDs) with well-defined edges in the zigzag direction, grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on an iridium(111) substrate, by low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS). We measure the atomic structure and local density of states (LDOS) of individual GQDs as a function of their size and shape in the range from a couple of nanometers up to ca. 20 nm. The results can be quantitatively modeled by a relativistic wave equation and atomistic tight-binding calculations. The observed states are analogous to the solutions of the text book "particle-in-a-box" problem applied to relativistic massless fermions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1110.4208,
title = {Quantum confined electronic states in atomically well-defined graphene nanostructures},
author = {Sampsa Hämäläinen and Zhixiang Sun and Mark P. Boneschanscher and Andreas Uppstu and Mari Ijäs and Ari Harju and Daniël Vanmaekelbergh and Peter Liljeroth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.4208},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett