Klein tunneling through the trapezoidal potential barrier in graphene: Conductance and shot noise

Abstract

When a single-layer graphene sheet is contacted with metallic electrodes, tunnel barriers are formed as a result of the doping of graphene by the metal in the contact region. If the Fermi energy level is modulated by a gate voltage, the phenomenon of Klein tunneling results in specific features in the conductance and noise. Here we obtain analytically exact solutions for the transmission and reflection probability amplitudes using a trapezoidal potential barrier, allowing us to calculate the differential conductance and the Fano factor for a graphene sheet in the ballistic regime.We put in evidence an unexpected global symmetry-the transmission probability is the same for energies symmetric with respect to half of the barrier height.We outline a proposal for the experimental verification of these ideas using realistic sample parameters.