Puddle-Induced Resistance Oscillations in the Breakdown of the Graphene Quantum Hall Effect

We report on the stability of the quantum Hall plateau in wide Hall bars made from a chemically gated graphene film grown on SiC. The v = 2 quantized plateau appears from fields B similar or equal to 5 T and persists up to B similar or equal to 80 T. At high current density, in the breakdown regime, the longitudinal resistance oscillates with a 1/B periodicity and an anomalous phase, which we relate to the presence of additional electron reservoirs. The high field experimental data suggest that these reservoirs induce a continuous increase of the carrier density up to the highest available magnetic field, thus enlarging the quantum plateaus. These in-plane inhomogeneities, in the form of high carrier density graphene pockets, modulate the quantum Hall effect breakdown and decrease the breakdown current.Funding Agencies|Agence national de la Recherche (ANR), Metrograph project [ANR-2011-NANO-004]; program of China Scholarships Council under the Grant CSC [201404490072]