MURI: Tailoring Electronic Properties of Graphene at the Nanoscale

Graphene, a single atom-thick plane of carbon, is a new electronic material with extraordinary properties. In graphene, electrons behave as if they have no mass, and their motion is governed by the same Dirac equation that describes ultra-relativistic particles. Electrons in graphene have extraordinarily high mobility at room temperature, and can penetrate through arbitrarily high barriers in their path (a curious property of relativistic particles known as the Klein paradox).

However, the lack of a bandgap in graphene prevents low-power digital electronics applications. One solution is to create a bandgap through nanostructuring: the confinement of electrons in graphene to a small structure induces a bandgap. This bandgap is tunable through the size, shape, and crystallographic orientation of the nanostructure, presenting unique opportunities for tailoring the electronic properties of a material by shaping it on the nanoscale.

The Graphene MURI is a five-year, multi-university effort funded by the Office of Naval Research, and started in 2009. The goal of the Graphene MURI is to generate, control, and understand the bandgap in nanostructured graphene through theory and experiment. The MURI team envisions a high-speed, low-power digital electronics technology based on bandgap engineering in graphene. Gapped graphene nanoelectronics technology will impact a wide range of DoD applications in communications, signal processing, sensing, and computing.