Bandgap engineering of zigzag graphene nanoribbons by manipulating edge states via defective boundaries

One of the most severe limits of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) in future applications is that zigzag GNRs (ZGNRs) are gapless, so cannot be used in field effect transistors (FETs), and armchair GNR (AGNR) based FETs require atomically precise control of edges and width. Using the tight-binding approach and first principles method, we derived and proved a general boundary condition for the opening of a significant bandgap in ZGNRs with defective edge structures. The proposed semiconducting ZGNRs have some interesting properties one of which is that they can be embedded and integrated in a large piece of graphene without the need to completely cut them out. We also demonstrated a new type of high-performance all-ZGNR FET. Previous proposals of graphene FETs are all based on AGNRs.