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TiO2 Nanowires as a Wide Bandgap Dirac Material: a numerical study of impurity scattering and Anderson disorder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2014

Gabriele Penazzi
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Peter Deák
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Bálint Aradi
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Tim Wehling
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany. Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Alessio Gagliardi
Affiliation:
Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Roma, Italy.
Huynh Anh Huy
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, School of Education, University of Can Tho, Can Tho, Viet Nam.
Binghai Yan
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Thomas Frauenheim
Affiliation:
Bremen Center for Computational Material Science, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
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Abstract

Dirac materials are characterized by exceptional mobility, orders of magnitude higher than any semiconductor, due to the massless pseudorelativistic nature of the Dirac fermions. These systems being semimetallic, the lack of a genuine band-gap poses a serious limitation to their possible applications in electronics. We recently demonstrated that thin TiO2 nanowires can exhibit 1D Dirac states similar to metallic carbon nanotubes, with the crucial difference that these states lie inside the conduction band in proximity of a wide band gap. We analyze the robustness of the Dirac states respect to an Anderson disorder model and substitutional impurity and compare to different one dimensional systems. The results suggest that thin anatase TiO2 nanowires can be a promising candidate material for switching devices.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2014 

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References

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