Electronic Transport in Hexagonal-Boron-Nitride-Encapsulated Graphene Limited by Remote Phonon Scattering

We study the impact of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) phonons on the electrical resistivity of hBN-encapsulated graphene. While encapsulation yields high-mobility devices, the surrounding hBN itself introduces remote scattering from polar optical phonons, whose role in standard resistivity measurements remains unclear. We combine high-quality transport experiments with ab initio calculations including a proper treatment of dynamically screened remote interactions. We demonstrate that hBN's out-of-plane phonons strongly influence resistivity between 150 K and room temperature, whereas higher-energy LO modes and intrinsic graphene phonons alone cannot explain the observed trends. The coupling between electrons and the hBN's phonons becomes more pronounced at low carrier densities due to reduced screening. Our findings establish that remote phonon scattering fundamentally limits transport in encapsulated graphene, solving a longstanding debate.