Abstract
Since the revolutionary experimental discovery of graphene in the year 2004, research on this new two-dimensional carbon allotrope has progressed at a spectacular pace. The impact of graphene on different areas of research— including physics, chemistry, and applied sciences— is only now starting to be fully appreciated. There are different factors that make graphene a truly impressive system. Regarding nano-electronics and related fields, for instance, it is the exceptional electronic and mechanical properties that yield very high room-temperature mobility values, due to the particular band structure, the material `cleanliness' (very low-concentration of impurities), as well as its stiffness. Also interesting is the possibility to have a high electrical conductivity and optical transparency, a combination which cannot be easily found in other material systems. For other fields, other properties could be mentioned, many of which are currently being explored.
In the first years following this discovery, research on graphene has mainly focused on the fundamental physics aspects, triggered by the fact that electrons in graphene behave as Dirac fermions due to their interaction with the ions of the honeycomb lattice. This direction has led to the discovery of new phenomena such as Klein tunneling in a solid state system and the so-called half-integer quantum Hall effect due to a special type of Berry phase that appears in graphene. It has also led to the appreciation of thicker layers of graphene, which also have outstanding new properties of great interest in their own right (e.g., bilayer graphene, which supports chiral quasiparticles that, contrary to Dirac electrons, are not massless). Now the time is coming to deepen our knowledge and improve our control of the material properties, which is a key aspect to take one step further towards applications.
The articles in the Semiconductor Science and Technology Graphene special issue deal with a diversity of topics and effectively reflect the status of different areas of graphene research. The excitonic condensation in a double graphene system is discussed by Kharitonov and Efetov. Borca et al report on a method to fabricate and characterize graphene monolayers epitaxially grown on Ru(0001). Furthermore, the energy and transport gaps in etched graphene nanoribbons are analyzed experimentally by Molitor et al. Mucha-Kruczyński et al review the tight-binding model of bilayer graphene, whereas Wurm et al focus on a theoretical description of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in monolayer graphene rings. Screening effects and collective excitations are studied by Roldán et al. Subsequently, Palacios et al review the electronic and magnetic structures of graphene nanoribbons, a problem that is highly relevant for graphene-based transistors. Klein tunneling in single and multiple barriers in graphene is the topic of the review article by Pereira Jr et al, while De Martino and Egger discuss the spectrum of a magnetic quantum dot in graphene. Titov et al study the effect of resonant scatterers on the local density of states in a rectangular graphene setup with metallic leads. Finally, the resistance modulation of multilayer graphene controlled by gate electric fields is experimentally analyzed by Miyazaki et al.
We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions, which combine new results and pedagogical discussions of the state-of-the-art in different areas: it is this combination that most often adds to the value of topical issues. Special thanks also goes to the staff of Institute of Physics Publishing for contributing to the success of this effort.