Electronic structure and transport properties of hydrogenated graphene and graphene nanoribbons

Abstract

The band gap opening is one of the important issues in applications of graphene and graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) to nanoscale electronic devices. As hydrogen strongly interacts with graphene and creates short-range disorder, the electronic structure is significantly modified by hydrogenation. Based on first-principles and tight-binding calculations, we investigate the electronic and transport properties of hydrogenated graphene and GNRs. In disordered graphene with low doses of H adsorbates, the low-energy states near the neutrality point are localized, and the degree of localization extends to high-energy states with increasing adsorbate density. To characterize the localization of eigenstates, we examine the inverse participation ratio and find that the localization is greatly enhanced for the defect levels, which are accumulated around the neutrality point. Our calculations support the previous result that even with a low dose of H adsorbates, graphene undergoes a metal-insulator transition. In GNRs, relaxations of the edge C atoms play a role in determining the edge structure and the hydrocarbon conformation at low and high H concentrations, respectively. In disordered nanoribbons, we find that the energy states near the neutrality point are localized and conductances through low-energy channels decay exponentially with sample size, similar to disordered graphene. For a given channel energy, the localization length tends to decrease as the adsorbate density increases. Moreover, the energy range of localization exceeds the intrinsic band gap.