Adatom Ordering, Bragg Scattering and Tunable Band Gap in Functionalized Graphene

Note: Pizza served at 11:45 AM
Speaker: Leonid Levitov, MIT

When: September 10, 2010 (Fri), 12:00PM to 01:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 352
Hosted by: Claudio Chamon

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract:
The unique electronic properties of graphene make it an attractive candidate for future nano-electronics applications. However, the gapless character of graphene band structure presents a major obstacle for graphene electronics. This talk will describe a proposal1 to use controlled chemical adsorption of adatoms or molecules similar to that employed in a recent work on hydrogenated graphene1, as a tool to open a band gap in this material. The gap is induced by Bragg scattering on a modulation resulting from adatom ordering among the A and B sublattices, which can occur even at small adatom concentration.

[1] D.A. Abanin, A.V. Shytov, L.S. Levitov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 086802 (2010);
A.V. Shytov, D.A. Abanin, L.S. Levitov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 16806 (2009)