Transport Properties of Graphene Materials

Graphene’s exceptional two-dimensional structure gives rise to remarkable transport phenomena, including ultrahigh carrier mobility, tunable conductivity and quantum-limited behaviour. Charge carriers in graphene exhibit ballistic transport over micrometre scales at low temperature and maintain high mobility even at room temperature when isolated from disorder by encapsulation or suspension. Scattering processes arise predominantly from charged impurities, lattice vibrations (phonons) and substrate-induced strain or roughness. Heterostructuring with hexagonal boron nitride and other van der Waals materials minimises disorder and enables exploration of high-field regimes, revealing phenomena such as room-temperature quantum Hall transport and magnetophonon oscillations. Control over carrier density through electrostatic gating or chemical doping allows systematic tuning of conductivity, while nanoscale fabrication techniques permit flexible and transparent device architectures. Understanding the interplay of intrinsic scattering mechanisms, substrate effects and external fields is essential for optimising graphene’s performance in sensors, high-frequency electronics and quantum devices.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have demonstrated phonon-mediated quantum Hall transport in graphene encapsulated by hexagonal boron nitride, extending quantised conductance up to room temperature under high magnetic fields and revealing a dissipation regime dominated by electron-phonon interactions. Complementary theoretical work has established a universal connection between carrier mobility and the variation of conductivity with carrier density by solving the Boltzmann transport equation for charged impurity and optical phonon scattering. This unified model reproduces a broad range of experimental data and offers predictive control over transport parameters through dopant engineering and impurity management.

Transport Properties of Graphene Materials publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in transport properties of graphene materials across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Electron mobility: Measure of the speed at which charge carriers move through a material under an applied electric field.

Carrier density: Concentration of free charge carriers (electrons or holes) per unit area in a two-dimensional material.

Electron-phonon scattering: Interaction between charge carriers and lattice vibrations that limits mobility and contributes to resistivity.

Quantum Hall effect: Phenomenon in which the transverse conductance of a two-dimensional electron system becomes quantised under strong magnetic fields.

Heterostructure: Stacked assembly of two-dimensional materials forming interfaces that modify electronic and transport properties.

Weak localisation: Quantum interference effect leading to increased resistivity at low temperatures due to coherent back-scattering of electrons.

References

1. Phonon-mediated room-temperature quantum Hall transport in graphene. Nature Communications (2023).
2. Universal mobility characteristics of graphene originating from charge scattering by ionised impurities. Communications Physics (2021).
3. Strong magnetophonon oscillations in extra-large graphene. Nature Communications (2019).
4. Quantum Nature of Charge Transport in Inkjet‐Printed Graphene Revealed in High Magnetic Fields up to 60T. Small (2024).
5. Enhanced Mobility in Suspended Chemical Vapor-Deposited Graphene Field-Effect Devices in Ambient Conditions. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2023).
6. Random Strain Fluctuations as Dominant Disorder Source for High-Quality On-Substrate Graphene Devices. Physical Review X (2014).