The Effect of Line-Edge Roughness on Electronic Transport Characteristics of a Graphene Nanoribbon Rectifier

This study was conducted to analyze the effect of line-edge roughness (LER) defects on the armchair graphene nanoribbon (AGNR) rectifier. The AGNR rectifier was fabricated using nitrogen doping in the right electrode of the AGNR. The self-consistent atomistic simulation was employed through non-equilibrium Green’s function formalism to calculate the electronic transport properties of the LER defected AGNR rectifier. Moreover, density functional-based tight binding (DFTB) was employed to explain the electronic band structure. The results revealed that the rectification properties can be modulated by changing the length or width of graphene nanoribbons. Moreover, it was found that the rectification ratio can reach an order of 104 when using AGNR_7 atoms in the width of LER defected AGNR rectifier, which is almost one order of magnitude larger than the perfect AGNR rectifier.