Transport in Graphene

Alex Wiener


Advisor: Markus Kinderman


Alex Wiener

Abstract

The non-equilibrium current fluctuations, or shot noise, in ballistic graphene have received much attention since the seminal 2006 paper by Tworzydlo et al. In that work, it was shown that shot noise can be generated even in a completely impurity-free sheet of graphene. This result is surprising, as shot noise is expected to vanish in conductors without electron scattering. The unexpected noise has been attributed to evanescent, that is, exponentially damped waves that backscatter electrons, even in clean graphene. The predicted shot noise has been verified experimentally, but the measurement is ambiguous, as the expected shot noise is also that of a disordered conductor. We propose several geometries for which the shot noise shows unambiguous signatures of evanescent mode transport in graphene.

Speaker bio

Alex Wiener was raised in southern New Hampshire. He graduated from Nashua High School in 2001 before attending Tulane University in New Orleans. His research experience at Tulane includes experimental biophysics, experimental neutron physics and theoretical atomic and molecular physics. Alex earned his bachelor's in 2005 with a math and physics double major. He then came to Georgia Tech, where he began doing research in quantum information theory before ultimately switching to condensed matter physics to work on transport theory in graphene.

Last updated 01-Dec-2010