Transport in Electrostatically Confined Bilayer Graphene Nanostructures

Quantum nanostructures, e.g., quantum wires and quantum dots, are needed for applications in quantum information processing devices, such as transistors or qubits. In gapped bilayer graphene (BLG), one can confine charge carriers purely electrostatically, inducing smooth confinement potentials and thereby limiting edge-induced perturbances, while allowing gate-defined control of the confined structure. I will report on a series of works on electrostatically confined nanostructure in gapped BLG. We demonstrated, e.g., how some of BLG's unusual properties, i.e., its states' Berry curvature-induced orbital magnetic moment and the mini valleys and band inversions of its non-parabolic low-energy dispersion, translate into a BLG quantum wire's transport properties and a quantum dot's single- and two-electron states. We investigated both theoretically, and in collaboration with experiments, how to tune these features of BLG nanostructures externally to make them useful in future quantum technology applications.