Conductance fluctuations in graphene in the presence of long-range disorder

J Phys Condens Matter. 2016 Apr 6;28(13):135302. doi: 10.1088/0953-8984/28/13/135302. Epub 2016 Mar 4.

Abstract

The fluctuations in the conductance of graphene that arise from a long-range disorder potential induced by random impurities are investigated with an atomic tight-binding lattice. The screened impurities lead to a slow variation of the background potential and this varies the overall potential landscape as the Fermi energy or an applied magnetic field is varied. As a result, the phase interference varies randomly and leads to fluctuations in the conductance. Recently, experiments have shown that an applied magnetic field produces a remarkable reduction in the amplitude of these conductance fluctuations. We find qualitative agreement with these experiments, and it appears that the reduction in magnetic field of the fluctuations arises from a field induced smoothing of the conductance landscape.