Electronic and transport properties of U-cut edge patterned AGNR superlattice for RTD application

Abstract

In this paper, we first characterize a superlattice structure created by repeating a heterostructure formed from two armchair graphene nanoribbon (AGNR) segments with different widths. We investigate the electronic and transport properties of this structure by varying its widths and lengths to demonstrate the tunability of its overall band gap. The plot of the local density of states shows the formation of localized states at the low band gap segments of the superlattice. The superlattice is then used as a barrier to create a double barrier quantum well (DBQW) to design a proposed resonant tunneling diode (RTD) structure. We observe this device's negative differential resistance (NDR) operation for a range of bias voltages between the contacts. We study the effect of dimensional parameters on the RTD performance. The non-equilibrium Green's function method, based on a tight-binding model, is employed for numerical computation.