Electronic Properties Of Zigzag Graphene Nanoribbons Research Articles

The electronic properties of graphene nanoribbons and the offset logarithm function

Graphene Nanoribbons (GN), being an important class of next-generation carbon materials, are of immense interest and find innumerable applications in diverse fields. A variation of the generalized Lambert W function, called the Offset Logarithm function, has been found to have important applications in fields such as physics, engineering and nanotechnology. We study the electronic properties of zigzag GN and use the generalized Lambert W function to study the eigenvalue equations of the massless Dirac equation applied to zigzag GN. We have studied the effects of nanoribbon width and determined the parameters that significantly affect the obtained solutions.

Strain effect on electronic structures of graphene nanoribbons: A first-principles study

We report a first-principles study on the electronic structures of deformed graphene nanoribbons (GNRs). Our theoretical results show that the electronic properties of zigzag GNRs are not sensitive to uniaxial strain, while the energy gap modification of armchair GNRs (AGNRs) as a function of uniaxial strain displays a nonmonotonic relationship with a zigzag pattern. The subband spacings and spatial distributions of the AGNRs can be tuned by applying an external strain. Scanning tunneling microscopy dI/dV maps can be used to characterize the nature of the strain states, compressive or tensile, of AGNRs. In addition, we find that the nearest neighbor hopping integrals between pi-orbitals of carbon atoms are responsible for energy gap modification under uniaxial strain based on our tight binding approximation simulations.