Thermal transport driven by charge imbalance in graphene in a magnetic field close to the charge neutrality point at low temperature: Nonlocal resistance

Abstract

Graphene grown epitaxially on SiC, close to the charge neutrality point (CNP), in an orthogonal magnetic field shows an ambipolar behavior of the transverse resistance accompanied by a puzzling longitudinal magnetoresistance. When injecting a transverse current at one end of the Hall bar, a sizable nonlocal transverse magnetoresistance is measured at low temperature. While Zeeman spin effect seems not to be able to justify these phenomena, some dissipation involving edge states at the boundaries could explain the order of magnitude of the nonlocal transverse magnetoresistance but not the asymmetry when the orientation of the orthogonal magnetic field is reversed. As a possible contribution to the explanation of the measured nonlocal magnetoresistance, which is odd in the magnetic field, we derive a hydrodynamic approach to transport in this system, which involves particle and hole Dirac carriers, in the form of charge and energy currents. We find that thermal diffusion can take place on a large distance scale, thanks to long recombination times, provided a noninsulating bulk of the Hall bar is assumed, as recent models seem to suggest in order to explain the appearance of the longitudinal resistance. In presence of the local source, some leakage of carriers from the edges generates an imbalance of carriers of opposite sign, which are separated in space by the magnetic field and diffuse along the Hall bar generating a nonlocal transverse voltage.