Abstract
Graphene-based materials are promising candidates for nanoelectronic devices1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 because very high carrier mobilities can be achieved without the use of sophisticated material preparation techniques1. However, the carrier mobilities reported for single-layer and bilayer graphene are still less than those reported for graphite crystals at low temperatures, and the optimum number of graphene layers for any given application is currently unclear, because the charge transport properties of samples containing three or more graphene layers have not yet been investigated systematically1. Here, we study charge transport through trilayer graphene as a function of carrier density, temperature, and perpendicular electric field. We find that trilayer graphene is a semimetal with a resistivity that decreases with increasing electric field, a behaviour that is markedly different from that of single-layer and bilayer graphene. We show that the phenomenon originates from an overlap between the conduction and valence bands that can be controlled by an electric field, a property that had never previously been observed in any other semimetal. We also determine the effective mass of the charge carriers, and show that it accounts for a large part of the variation in the carrier mobility as the number of layers in the sample is varied.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge E. McCann, M. Koshino and T. Ando for illuminating discussions and for sharing their preliminary theoretical results concerning the band structure modulation of trilayer graphene. We acknowledge financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, grant P07372 (M.F.C.), Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (S.R.), Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists A (no. 20684011) and Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology—Japan Science and Technology Agency (080300000477) (M.Y.). A.F.M. gratefully acknowledges financial support from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VICI and Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter in the Netherlands and from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 200021-121569). S.T. acknowledges financial support from the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research S (no. 19104007), B (no. 18340081) and Japan Science and Technology Agency—Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology.
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M.F.C. and S.R. contributed equally to this work: they conceived and performed the experiments, analysed the data, and wrote the manuscript. A.F.M. contributed to the interpretation of the data and to writing the manuscript. J.B.O. contributed to the device fabrication. M.Y. contributed to the realization of the measurement setups. S.T. directed the research. All authors discussed the results extensively and commented on the manuscript.
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Craciun, M., Russo, S., Yamamoto, M. et al. Trilayer graphene is a semimetal with a gate-tunable band overlap. Nature Nanotech 4, 383–388 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.89
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.89
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