Influence of correlated impurities on conductivity of graphene sheets: Time-dependent real-space Kubo approach

Abstract

Exact numerical calculations of the conductivity of graphene sheets with random and correlated distributions of disorders have been performed using the time-dependent real-space Kubo formalism. The disorder was modeled by the long-range Gaussian potential describing screened charged impurities and by the short-range potential describing neutral adatoms both in the weak and strong scattering regime. Our central result is that correlation in the spatial distribution for the strong short-range scatterers and for the long-range Gaussian potential do not lead to any enhancement of the conductivity in comparison to the uncorrelated case. Our results strongly indicate that the temperature enhancement of the conductivity reported in the recent study (Yan and Fuhrer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 206601 (2011)) and attributed to the effect of dopant correlations was most likely caused by other factors not related to the correlations in the scattering potential.