Electronic transport in graphene nanoribbons with disorder look at the pseudo-spin polarization: Dirac versus tight-binding model

Abstract

We have compared results of electronic transport using two different approaches: Dirac vs tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians to assesses disorder-induced effects in graphene nanoribbons. We apply the proposed Hamiltonians to calculate the density of states, the transmission along the ribbon, and the pseudo-spin polarization (P(E)) in metallic armchair graphene nanoribbons. We clearly show differences between these two approaches in the interference processes, especially in the low-lying energy limit, when the systems are found in the presence of random impurities (disorder). This allows us to find fingerprints associated with each model used. As the disorder increases, more robust electronic transmission (through polarized states in a given sublattice) arises when one is dealing with the Dirac model only. We also find with this model unexpected peaks in the P(E) far from the Dirac point for wider nanoribbons. In the other hand, the model TB show the Dirac limit with disturbances of the hyperboloid subbands for certain potentials of the impurities. In general, our study is indicating that a P(E) spectroscopy (analyzing the line width and intensity) can be used to detect fingerprints of the increase of asymmetry in the scattering processes and the transport limits where hyperboloid subbands are important.