Dynamics of charge carriers on hexagonal nanoribbons with vacancy defects

We develop a general model to investigate the dynamics of charge carriers in vacancy endowed honeycomb two-dimensional nanolattices. As a fundamental application, results concerning the influence of vacancies placed on different sites of semiconducting armchair graphene nanoribbons (AGNR) over the transport of polarons are presented. It is observed that the positioning of vacancies plays a major role over the scattering of the charge carriers, in the sense that their overall mobility is determined by where the defect is allocated. By considering different structural configurations of the system, the arising polaron can either move freely or be reflected. Therefore, our work provides a phenomenological understanding of the underlying mechanism responsible for the change of conductivity experienced by systems in which structural defects are present, a fact that has been reported for different nanostructures of the same symmetry. Because vacancies are one of the most common kinds of defects and are, in practice, unavoidable, the kind of description proposed in the present paper is crucial to correctly address transport and electronic properties in more realistic electronic devices based on two-dimensional nanolattices.