Armchair Graphene Nanoribbon Resonant Tunneling Diodes Using Antidote and BN Doping

Band gap size of armchair graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) can be tuned by implementing topological antidotes or boron/nitride (BN) atoms at the middle of ribbons. By imposing such modulated patterns on certain regions of AGNRs, double barrier quantum well structures can be produced. According to this procedure, this paper proposes a new method for constructing resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) by using AGNRs while the widths of the ribbons remain constant. Different structures of modulated AGNR-RTDs are constructed by introducing hexagonal antidotes, hexagonal BN doping atoms, and the combination of antidotes and BN doping atoms at the middle of pristine AGNRs. It is found that in general, antidote AGNR-RTDs present negative differential resistance with better performance in comparison with other modulated AGNR-RTDs. In addition, the effects of dimensional parameters such as the length of channel, the length of barrier, and the distance between antidotes on the performance of antidote AGNR-RTDs are investigated. It is extracted that the peak to valley ratio, power dissipation, and other properties can be modified by tuning the dimensional parameters to appropriate values. Numerical tight-binding model along with nonequilibrium Green's function formalism is applied to study the electronic properties of devices.