Effect of current annealing on electronic properties of multilayer graphene

Abstract

While ideal graphene has high mobility due to the relativistic nature of carriers, it is known that the carrier transport in actual graphene samples is dominated by the influence of scattering from charged impurities, which almost conceals the intrinsic splendid properties of this novel material. The common techniques to improve the graphene mobility include the annealing in hydrogen atmosphere and the local annealing by imposing a large biasing current. Although annealing is quite important technique for the experimental study of graphene, detailed evaluation of the annealing effect is lacking at present. In this paper, we study the effect of the current annealing in multilayer graphene devices quantitatively by investigating the change in the mobility and the carrier density at the charge neutrality point. We find that the current annealing sometimes causes degradation of the transport properties. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.