Strain-Engineered Graphene Waveguides: Enabling Ballistic Dirac Fermion Transport via Nanowrinkles

Graphene has attracted considerable attention due to its exceptional electronic, mechanical, and thermal properties, making it a strong candidate for various advanced applications. However, unlike conventional semiconductors, its gapless electronic structure poses challenges for current control at the nanoscale. Mechanical deformation has been used to modify the structure of graphene, creating new quantum states and enhancing transport properties. In particular, lattice deformation can generate strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields (PMFs), which are crucial for the formation of one-dimensional conduction channels in nanowrinkles to advance quantum information technology.

In this talk, we present a strain-engineered graphene waveguide that exploits nanowrinkle-induced PMF to guide Dirac fermions using a tight-binding model to identify the waveguide modes. Our results show that the waveguide supports quantum information transfer through well-defined 1D conduction channels with minimal scattering. We also investigate the effect of bending the nanowrinkle and show that the Dirac fermion transport remains robust for small bending angles but can degrade as the angle increases. These findings provide a novel approach to controlling Dirac fermion transport by strain engineering, with significant potential for future quantum information devices such as flying qubits or quantum interferometers.