Deliverable 1.1 - Contacted graphene nanoribbons and transport measurements

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) grown epitaxially on silicon carbide (SiC) substrates could serve as key building block for future graphene-based nanoelectronic devices, and as platform to study quantum transport at the nanoscale. The deterministic and ordered growth of graphene on the silicon terminated face of SiC enables, in principle, the bottom-up growth of either zig-zag (ZZ) or armchair (AC) terminated GNRs (Fig.1). Baringhaus et al. showed that bottom-up grown GNRs are disorder-free and can support ballistic transport of carriers for distances of up to 16 um [1]. Such transport results have not been reproduced by other groups [1-3]. In this deliverable we report microfabrication and graphene growth processes to produce epitaxial GNRs on SiC. Moreover, we report our first results of electron transport obtained by contacting epitaxial GNRs. The ability to produce epitaxial GNRs lay the foundations for deliverable D1.3 (year 3), aiming at performing scanning tunneling spectroscopy of GNRs