Conductivity of graphene affected by metal adatoms

Abstract

It has been a mystery how metal atoms adsorbed on perfect graphene impact the conductivity. We deposited Al, Cu, or Ag atoms onto graphene sheet on SiO2 substrate at room temperature or 573 K by pulsed laser ablation and measured the zero-gate resistance in-situ, showing that the resistance increased suddenly just after each of the deposition pulse and then decayed slowly to an elevated plateau, forming a sequential jagged peaks. Based on the fact that most areas of the graphene sheet are of perfect lattice structure, our calculations via first principles suggest that the resistance peaks result directly from the contribution of metal atoms landed on the perfect regions, and decaying of the peaks corresponds to the clustering process of the metal atoms.