Electron transport in graphene/h-BN lateral hybrids: Rhombus and bowtie domains Ali Mehri a, * , Maryam Jamaati b , Afshin Namiranian b a Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran b Department of Physics, Iran University of Science and Technology, Narmak,16345, Tehran, Iran article info Article history: Received 7 April 2017 Received in revised form 29 April 2017 Accepted 3 May 2017 Available online xxx Keywords: Graphene/hBN hybrid Nanoflake Electronic transport Non-equilibrium Green's function abstract Electron transport in graphene/h-BN lateral hybrids with rhombus and bowtie domains is investigated. We apply non-equilibrium Green's function method under tight binding approximation to calculate electrical transmission in mentioned hybrid monolayers. Our findings reveal the importance of size and shape of doped regions in the transport through hybrid systems. Generally, we find that boron and nitrogen doping in zigzag graphene nanoflake, with both rhombus and bowtie patterns, improves its conductance. Growing size of the doped segments, in fixed system size, leads to a stable conductance level. Moreover, carbon doping in h-BN can also make a tunable semiconducting behavior. In the latter case, when the system size is kept constant, enlarging the doped carbon domains exponentially rise up the transmission. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Graphene, as an important member of two dimensional layered materials family, has received extensive scientific and industrial attention due to its unique electronic, mechanical and thermal properties [1e3]. Since pristine graphene is a zero- gap semimetal, tailoring its conductive properties is desirable to open band gap for applications such as electronic devices [4e6]. Among different strategies, exploring techniques to achieve this goal gave rise to a novel class of two dimensional ma- terials, referred to as “graphene hybrids” [7,8]. As a close analog of graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) known as white graphene, is a large band gap semiconductor. It has shown the possibility to transform graphene and h-BN from their intrinsic nature to n-type or p-type semiconductors by substituting carbon (C) atoms with boron (B) and nitrogen (N) atoms to make graphene/h-BN (h-CBN) hybrids [9e11], and by doping C atoms in h-BN (h-BNC) [12,13]. Despite the similarities between lattice parameters and the bond length of graphene and h-BN, the electronic properties of h-BN is drastically different from those of graphene [8]. Since h-BN is a wide band gap compound [14], h-CBN and h-BNC hybrid structures provide the diversity and flexibility to develope electronic devices [15e17]. Recently, the possibility of directly merging graphene and h-BN into in-plane (lateral) graphene/h-BN (h-CBN and h-BNC) hybrids with well controlled shape and size of doping domains has been experimentally realized by various groups [18e22]. Experimental works has been also confirmed improved device performance suitable for wide applications in modern elec- tronics using h-CBN and h-BNC hybrids [5,23e25]. Furtheremore, extensive theoretical calculations have been investigated * Corresponding author. E-mail address: alimehri@nit.ac.ir (A. Mehri). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Superlattices and Microstructures journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/superlattices http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.spmi.2017.05.005 0749-6036/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Superlattices and Microstructures xxx (2017) 1e9 Please cite this article in press as: A. Mehri et al., Electron transport in graphene/h-BN lateral hybrids: Rhombus and bowtie domains, Superlattices and Microstructures (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.spmi.2017.05.005