1. Introduction
Although electronic properties of matter are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics [
1], it is very unlikely to find that any measurable characteristic of a macroscopic system is determined solely by the universal constants of nature, such as the elementary charge (
e) or the Planck constant (
h). In the last century, two notable exceptions arrived with the phenomena of superconductivity [
2], namely, the quantization of magnetic flux piercing the superconducting circuit, being the multiplicity of the flux quantum
[
3,
4], and the
ac Josephson effect, with the universal frequency-to-voltage ratio given by
[
5]. Later, with the advent of semiconducting heterostructures [
6], came the quantum Hall effect [
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12] and the conductance quantization [
13], bringing us with the conductance quantum
(with the degeneracy
, 2, or 4). Further development of nanosystems led to the observation of Aharonov-Bohm effect manifesting itself by magnetoconductance oscillations with the period
[
14], as well as the universal conductance fluctuations [
15,
16,
17,
18], characterized by a variance
, with an additional symmetry-dependent prefactor (
, 2, or 4). Related, but slightly different issue concerns the Wiedemann-Franz (WF) law defining the Lorentz number,
(with the Boltzmann constant
) [
2], as the proportionality coefficient between electronic part of the thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity multiplied by absolute temperature. Although the WF law is followed, with a few-percent accuracy, in various condensed-matter systems, it has never been shown to have metrological accuracy [
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24].
Some new ’magic numbers’ similar to the mentioned above have arrived with the discovery of graphene, an atomically-thin form of carbon [
11,
12]. For undoped graphene samples, charge transport is dominated by transport via evanescent modes [
25], resulting in the universal
dc conductivity
accompanied by the sub-Poissonian shot noise, with a Fano factor
[
26,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31]. For high frequencies,
ac conductivity is given by
, leading to the quantized visible light opacity
(with
being the fine-structure constant) [
32,
33,
34]. A possible new universal value is predicted for the maximum absolute thermopower, which approaches
near the charge neutrality point, for both monolayer and gapless bilayer graphene [
39,
40,
41,
42,
43].
Away from the charge-neutrality point, ballistic graphene samples show the sub-Sharvin charge transport [
35,
36], characterized by the conductance reduced by a factor of
compared to standard Sharvin contacts in two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) [
37,
38]. What is more, the shot noise is enhanced (comparing to 2DEG) up to
far from the charge-neutrality [
30,
31]. Detailed dependence of the above-mentioned factors on a sample geometry was recently discussed in analytical terms [
36], on the example of edge-free (Corbino) setup, characterized by the inner radius
and the outer radius
(see
Figure 1). It is further found in Refs. [
35,
36] that the ballistic values of the conductance and Fano factor are gradually restored when the potential barrier, defining a sample area in the effective Dirac-Weyl Hamiltonian, evolves from a rectangular toward a parabolic shape.
Here, we focus on the Corbino geometry, which is often considered when discussing fundamental aspects of graphene [
25,
44,
45,
46,
47,
48,
49,
50,
51,
52,
53,
54]. In this geometry, charge transport at high magnetic fields is unaffected by edge states, allowing one to probe the bulk transport properties [
48,
49,
50,
51,
52,
53]. Recently, we have shown numerically that thermoelectric properties in such a situation are determined by the energy interval separating consecutive Landau levels rather then by the transport gap (being the energy interval, for which the cyclotron diameter
) [
54]. In this paper, we address a question how the shot-noise behaves when the tunneling conductance regime is entered by increasing magnetic field at a fixed doping (or decreasing the doping at a fixed field)? Going beyond the linear-response regime, we find that the threshold voltage
, defined as a source-drain voltage difference that activates the current at minimal doping, is accompanied by quasi-universal (i.e., weakly-dependent on the radii ratio
) value of
. The robustness of the effect is also analyzed when smoothing the electrostatic potential barrier.
The paper is organized as follows. In Sec.
Section 2 we briefly present the effective Dirac Hamiltonian and the numerical approach applied in remaining parts of the paper. In Sec.
Section 3, we derive an approximation for the transmission through a doped Corbino disk at non-zero magnetic field and subsequent formulas for charge-transfer characteristics: the conductance and the Fano factor. Our numerical results, for both the rectangular and smooth potential barriers, are presented in Sec.
Section 4. The conclusions are given in Sec.
Section 5.
5. Conclusions
We have put forward an analytic description of the shot-noise power in graphene-based disks in high magnetic field and doping. Assuming the incoherent scattering of Dirac fermions between two potential steps of an infinite height, both characterized by a priori nonzero transmission probability due to the Klein tunneling, we find that vanishing conductance should be accompanied by the Fano factor , weakly-dependent on the disk proportions.
Next, the results of analytic considerations are confronted with the outcome of computer simulations, including both rectangular and smooth shapes of the electrostatic potential barrier in the disk area. Calculating both linear-response and finite-voltage transport cumulants, within the zero-temperature Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we point out that the role of evanescent waves (earlier ignored in the analytic approach) is significant in the linear-response regime, however, one should able to detect the quasi-universal noise in a properly designed experiment going beyond the linear response regime. To achieve this goal, the following procedure is proposed: First, the activation voltage (for a fixed magnetic field) needs to be determined, by finding a cusp position on the conductance-versus-voltage plot, above which the conductance grows fast with the voltage (the average chemical potential is controlled by the gate such that the conductance is minimal for a given voltage). Having the activation voltage determined, one measures the noise for such a voltage, expecting the Fano factor to be close to .
We expect that the effect we describe should be observable in ultraclean samples and sub-kelvin temperatures (such as in Ref. [
48]); for higher temperatures, hydrodynamic effects may noticeably alter the measurable quantities [
53]. Since the noise-related characteristics seem to be generally more sensitive to the potential shape then the conductance (or the thermoelectric properties earlier discussed in Ref. [
54]), the experimental study following the scenario presented here may be a suitable way to check whether the flat-potential area of a mesoscopic size is present or not in a given graphene-based structure.