Latest Ballistic conduction Stories
Physicists at the University of New South Wales have observed a new kind of interaction that can arise between electrons in a single-atom silicon transistor. The findings, to be published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, offer a more complete understanding of the mechanisms for electron transport in nanostructures at the atomic level. "We have been able to study some of the most complicated transport mechanisms that can arise up to the single atom level," says lead...
How massless electrons tunnel through energy barriers in a carbon sheet called graphene Electrons moving in graphene behave in an unusual way, as demonstrated by 2010 Nobel Prize laureates for physics Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who performed transport experiments on this one-carbon-atom-thick material. A review article, just published in EPJ B¹, explores the theoretical and experimental results to date of electrons tunneling through energy barriers in graphene. As good an...
Valley-based electronics, also known as valleytronics, is one step closer to reality. Two researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have shown that the valley degree of freedom in graphene can be polarized through scattering off a line defect. Unlike previously proposed valley filters in graphene, which rely on confined structures that have proven hard to achieve experimentally, the present work is based on a naturally occurring line defect that has already been observed. The...
A new "templated growth" technique for fabricating nanoribbons of epitaxial graphene has produced structures just 15 to 40 nanometers wide that conduct current with almost no resistance. These structures could address the challenge of connecting graphene devices made with conventional architectures "“ and set the stage for a new generation of devices that take advantage of the quantum properties of electrons."We can now make very narrow, conductive nanoribbons that have...
