Towards Graphene-Based Electronics

Abstract : During the last year, we have published more than 20 research papers including 2 Science papers, 4 papers in Nature Physics and Nature Communications and 5 Phys. Rev. Letters. The most important technological result probably was the development of fabrication procedures to encapsulate graphene between boron-nitride crystals, which allows us to routinely achieve mobilities above 100,000 cm2/Vs and demonstrate room-temperature ballistic transport at micron scale (Nano Lett. 11, 2396, 2011). This development also led to the first double-layer graphene heterostructures, in which we reported interesting interaction phenomena (Nature Phys. online 2011) and which continue to be in the focus of our attention offering a wealth of new physics and potential applications. Interaction phenomena have also been studied in suspended devices made from graphene and its bilayer (Science 333, 860, 2011; Nature Phys. 7, 701, 2011) and by using the nonlocal geometry (Science 332, 328, 2011). As a result we can now routinely make and investigate complex graphene-BN heterostructures with mobilities 10 times higher than for graphene on the standard Si substrates. For suspended graphene devices, we achieve mobilities well above a million, that is, 100 times higher than for graphene on a Si substrate. Another important development over the last year was the demonstration of a graphene-based derivative, fluorographene that is a two-dimensional version of Teflon (Small 6, 2877, 2010). In all these publications, the PIs have gratefully acknowledged the AFOSR support. As concerns the entire 3-year project, it resulted in 4 Science research papers and dozens of reports in Nature series magazines, Phys. Rev. Letters, Nano Letters and other high-quality research journals. Despite the short reported period, our research has already caused very high impact that can be quantified by the number of citations for the papers supported by the AFOSR grant.