Quantum confinement of electrons in 0D and 1D structures, known as quantum dots and quantum wires, permits to address quantum properties at the single electron level. We have developed a novel nanopatterning technique, which uses H atoms as building blocks to rise atomically sharp barriers that efficiently confine graphene electrons. By means of STM, we have built graphene nanostructures, with arbitrary shapes and dimensions, in the scale of 2 to 1000 nanometers. The method permits to erase and rebuild the patterns at will, and it can be implemented on different graphene substrates.
Our STM experiments demonstrate that such graphene nanostructures confine very efficiently graphene Dirac quasiparticles, both in 1D and 0D structures.
ADVANCED MATERIALS 32, 2001119 (2020) Article
Tunable graphene energy band gap
Three triangular graphene quantum dots fabricated on a electronically decoupled graphene layer on SiC(000-1).
In graphene quantum dots, we find perfectly defined energy band gaps up to 0.8eV, scaling as the inverse of the linear dimension, as expected for massless Dirac fermions.
Visualization of quantum confined electronic states inside 1D and 0D graphene nanostructures fabricated on BL graphene on SiC(0001)