Electrical resistivity of polycrystalline graphene: effect of grain-boundary-induced strain fields

Abstract

We have revealed the decisive role of grain-boundary-induced strain fields in electron scattering in polycrystalline graphene. To this end, we have formulated the model based on Boltzmann transport theory which properly takes into account the microscopic structure of grain boundaries (GB) as a repeated sequence of heptagon–pentagon pairs. We show that at naturally low GB charges the strain field scattering dominates and leads to physically reasonable and, what is important, experimentally observable values of the electrical resistivity. It ranges from 0.1 to 10 kOmegaupmu m for different types of symmetric GBs with a size of 1 upmum and has a strong dependence on misorientation angle. For low-angle highly charged GBs, two scattering mechanisms may compete. The resistivity increases markedly with decreasing GB size and reaches values of 60 kOmegaupmum and more. It is also very sensitive to the presence of irregularities modeled by embedding of partial disclination dipoles. With significant distortion, we found an increase in resistance by more than an order of magnitude, which is directly related to the destruction of diffraction on the GB. Our findings may be of interest both in the interpretation of experimental data and in the design of electronic devices based on poly- and nanocrystalline graphene.