Designing Nano-gadgetry: Heterojunctions of Boron Nitride and Graphene Nanoribbons for Nano-electronic Devices

Abstract

Graphene and zigzag-edged graphene nanoribbon (Z-GNR) has an excellent electrical conductivity, but the gapless electronic structure limits its potential applications in nanoelectronics. In contrast, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and zigzag-edged boron nitride nanoribbons (Z-BNNR) exhibits insulating properties with a wide band gap although it draws much attention due to its super thermal and chemical stabilities. Therefore, it can be expected that the merging of a Z-GNR and a Z-BNNR can form heterojunctions with remarkable electronic properties for the applications in nanoscale electronics, such as nanowire, diode, transistor and switch. In this research, we investigated the electronic transport properties of Z-GNR/Z-BNNR heterojunctions with a variety of different heterojunction.

In these works, we successfully provide the potential applications of our systematically designed noble structures of Z-GNR/Z-BNNR heterojunctions in nanoscale electronics. Our designed structures provide characteristic features of electronic devices, especially Esaki-like diode with Negative Differential Resistance (NDR) and multilevel conducting behaviors with stepwise current increase with respect to source-drain bias voltage. We believe that our results pave the way for the application of heterojunction systems in nanoelectronics.