The effect of Si impurities on the transport properties and the electron-surface phonon interaction in single layer graphene deposited on polar substrates

We investigated theoretically the effect of introducing Si impurities in a single layer graphene (1LG) that had been deposited on a polar substrate on the transport properties of the graphene layer. We consider in our analysis the scattering effects due to the surface optical (SO) phonons located at the interface of the 1LG with various polar substrates such asSiC, hexagonal BN,SiO2andHfO2. Our results demonstrate a reduction of SO phonon-limited (SOPL) mobility, and SOPL conductivity as well as an increase of the SOPL resistivity and of the scattering rate in the presence of Si impurities in the 1LG. Further, we studied the effect of Si impurities on the electron-surface phonon interaction. For our analysis we used the eigenenergies aquired from the tight-binding Hamiltonian in 1LG. Indeed the presence of the Si impurities induces a decrement in the resonant coupling between the electronic sub-levels and the surface vibration modes in monolayer graphene deposited on polar substrates. Finally, we investigated the effect of Si impurities on the Auger scattering process which affects the carriers relaxation. Our results show an enhancement of the Auger scattering rate in the case of the Si-doped 1LG compared to the undoped 1LG.