Charge Carrier Transmission in Bilayer Graphene

Open Access
- Author:
- Zern, Zachary T
- Area of Honors:
- Physics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Jun Zhu, Thesis Supervisor
Prof. Richard Wallace Robinett, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Graphene
Split Gate
COMSOL Multiphysics - Abstract:
- This thesis focuses upon experimentally deriving transmission rates of electrons as a function of angular incidence upon a potential barrier within bilayer graphene. This was achieved by creating a bilayer graphene device set atop a split gate that would allow for the establishment of a potential barrier; this process included exfoliation, transfer, and lithographic techniques. Due to the advanced and expansive nature of device fabrication and the testing process, my contribution to the project focused on three related tasks: the initial exfoliation of a suitable bilayer sample, modeling potential split gate geometries to examine electronic properties using simulation software, and imaging and analyzing a sample split gate edge contour. Ultimately, the experimental results that were obtained were not sufficient to make quantitative analysis possible. However, the work that I conducted to simulate gate geometries and also the analysis of a gate edge contour both yielded results that are useful for the ongoing study of bilayer charge carrier transmission rates; my simulation results provide computational models for various electronic characteristics of various split gate geometries, and my edge contour work provides a cursory treatment of a problem that can arise in experimentally derived transmission rates, as a result of the jagged nature of the gate surface.