A transport isolation by orbital hybridization transformation toward graphene nanoribbon-based nanostructure integration

Abstract Among feature-rich graphene-related materials, graphene nanoribbon (GNR)-based nanostructures are particularly attractive because they can provide tunable and excellent electronic properties. However, the integration of high-quality GNR-based nanostructures on a large scale is still an open area. In this paper, a novel idea is proposed: transport isolation. By a construction of different orbital hybridizations of the carbon atoms in graphene, the GNR regions and functionalized graphene regions are integrated. In the hybrid system, the functionalized graphene regions play the role of the isolation barrier. Based on the first principle calculation, it is demonstrated that about 0.6 nm wide hydrogenated graphene is enough to reliably isolate the GNR regions. Besides, it is revealed that once the armchair GNRs (AGNRs) are fully isolated by functionalized graphene, their band gaps are basically maintained and are weakly dependent on the width of functionalized graphene regions. In addition, the transport characteristics of those isolated AGNRs are verified to be similar to the pristine AGNRs at the device level. The above virtues infer our method can effectively produce a reliable isolation, verified by a simulation of device integration demo. We hope it can provide an intriguing option for the integration of GNR-based nanostructures.