Determining the nature of the gap in semiconducting graphene

Since its discovery, graphene has held great promise as a two-dimensional (2D) metal with massless carriers and, thus, extremely high-mobility that is due to the character of the band structure that results in the so-called Dirac cone for the ideal, perfectly ordered crystal structure. This promise has led to only limited electronic device applications due to the lack of an energy gap which prevents the formation of conventional device geometries. Thus, several schemes for inducing a semiconductor band gap in graphene have been explored. These methods do result in samples whose resistivity increases with decreasing temperature, similar to the temperature dependence of a semiconductor. However, this temperature dependence can also be caused by highly diffusive transport that, in highly disordered materials, is caused by Anderson-Mott localization and which is not desirable for conventional device applications. In this letter, we demonstrate that in the diffusive case, the conventional description of the insulating state is inadequate and demonstrate a method for determining whether such transport behavior is due to a conventional semiconductor band gap.