Observation of oscillatory resistance behavior in coupled Bernal and rhombohedral stacking graphene.

We report on the first observation of an anomalous temperature-dependent resistance behavior in coupled Bernal and rhombohedral stacking graphene. At low-temperature regime (<50 K) the temperature-dependent resistance exhibits a drop while at high-temperature regions (>250 K), the resistance increases. In the transition region (50-250 K) an oscillatory resistance behavior was observed. This property is not present in any layered graphene structures other than five-layer. We propose that the temperature-dependent resistance behavior is governed by the interplay of the Coulomb and short-range scatterings. The origin of the oscillatory resistance behavior is the ABCAB and ABABA stacking configurations, which induces tunable bandgap in the five-layer graphene. The obtained results also indicate that a perpendicular magnetic field opens an excitonic gap because of the Coulomb interaction-driven electronic instabilities, and the bandgap of the five-layer graphene is thermally activated. Potentially, the observed phenomenon provides important transport information to the design of few-layer graphene transistors that can be manipulated by a magnetic field.

Effect of magnetic field on the electronic transport in trilayer graphene.

The perpendicular magnetic field dependence of the longitudinal resistance in trilayer graphene at various temperatures has been systematically studied. For a fixed magnetic field, the trilayer graphene displays an intrinsic semiconductor behavior over the temperature range of 5-340 K. This is attributed to the parabolic band structure of trilayer graphene, where the Coulomb scattering is a strong function of temperature. The dependence of resistance on the magnetic field can be explained by the splitting of Landau levels (LLs). Our results reveal that the energy gap in the trilayer graphene is thermally activated and increases with √B.