Temperature collapse of the electric conductivity in bilayer graphene

Abstract

Recent experiments have reported evidence of dominant electron-hole scattering in the electric conductivity of suspended bilayer graphene near charge neutrality. According to these experiments, plots of the electric conductivity as a function of μ/kBT (chemical potential scaled with temperature) obtained for different temperatures in the range of 12K≲T≲40K collapse on a single curve independent of T. In a recent theory, this observation has been taken as an indication that the main subdominant scattering process is not electron impurity but electron-phonon. Here, we demonstrate that the collapse of the data on a single curve can be explained without invoking electron-phonon scattering but assuming that the suspended bilayer graphene is not a truly gapless system and by including the effect of electron-hole puddles in the subdominant charged impurity scattering mechanism. With a gap of ∼5meV, our theory produces excellent agreement with the observed conductivity over the full reported range of temperatures. These results are based on the hydrodynamic theory of conductivity, which, thus, emerges as a solid foundation for the analysis of experiments and the estimation of the band gap in multiband systems.