Disorder-Induced Enhancement of Transport through Graphenep−nJunctions

Abstract

We investigate the electron transport through a graphene $p\mathrm{\text{−}}n$ junction under a perpendicular magnetic field. By using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism combined with the nonequilibrium Green function method, the conductance is studied for clean and disordered samples. For the clean $p\mathrm{\text{−}}n$ junction, the conductance is quite small. In the presence of disorders, it is strongly enhanced and exhibits a plateau structure at a suitable range of disorders. Our numerical results show that the lowest plateau can survive for a very broad range of disorder strength, but the existence of high plateaus depends on system parameters and sometimes cannot be formed at all. When the disorder is slightly outside of this disorder range, some conductance plateaus can still emerge with its value lower than the ideal value. These results are in excellent agreement with a recent experiment.