Ballistic transport in graphene antidot lattices

Abstract

Graphene samples can have a very high carrier mobility if influences from the substrate and the environment are minimized. Embedding a graphene sheet into a heterostructure with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) on both sides was shown to be a particularly efficient way of achieving a high bulk mobility. Nanopatterning graphene can add extra damage and drastically reduce sample mobility by edge disorder. Preparing etched graphene nanostructures on top of an hBN substrate instead of SiO2 is no remedy, as transport characteristics are still dominated by edge roughness. Here we show that etching fully encapsulated graphene on the nanoscale is more gentle and the high mobility can be preserved. To this end, we prepared graphene antidot lattices where we observe magnetotransport features stemming from ballistic transport. Due to the short lattice period in our samples we can also explore the boundary between the classical and the quantum transport regime.