Impurity electrons in narrow electric field-biased armchair graphene nanoribbons

Abstract

We present an analytical investigation of the quasi-Coulomb impurity states in a narrow gapped armchair graphene nanoribbon (GNR) in the presence of a uniform external electric field directed parallel to the ribbon axis. The effect of the ribbon confinement is taken to be much greater than that of the impurity electric field, which in turn considerably exceeds the external electric field. Under these conditions we employ the adiabatic approximation assuming that the motion parallel ("slow") and perpendicular ("fast") to the ribbon axis are separated adiabatically. In the approximation of the isolated size-quantized subbands induced by the "fast" motion the complex energies of the impurity electron are calculated in explicit form. The real and imaginary parts of these energies determine the binding energy and width of the quasi-discrete state, respectively. The energy width increases with increasing the electric field and ribbon width. The latter forms the background of the mechanism of dimensional ionization. The S-matrix - the basic tool of study of the transport problems can be trivially derived from the phases of the wave functions of the continuous spectrum presented in explicit form. In the double-subband approximation we calculate the complete widths of the impurity states caused by the combined effect of the electric field and the Fano resonant coupling between the impurity states of the discrete and continuous spectra associated with the ground and first excited size-quantized subbands.