Electronic transport across realistic grain boundaries in graphene

Abstract

We perform a MonteCarlo simulation in order to study the connection between the morphology and the transport properties of grain boundaries (GBs) in graphene. We explore the configurational space of GBs to generate ensembles of realistic models of disordered interfaces between graphene misoriented domains. Among other observables, transmission across GBs has been probed all along the simulation, thus making us able to establish a connection between averaged transmission and the topological invariant of GBs, the misorientation angle. We extend to disordered GBs the remarkable result that the low angle regime is characterized by a decrease of the individual GB conductance upon a reduction of the angle, as first found for periodic GBs. However, we explored a comprehensive range of misorientation angles such that our results should serve as a starting data set to study the effect of polycrystallicity on transport in large samples.