- Accepted Paper
Electron transport in disordered borophene nanoribbons with hexagonal vacancies
Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 30 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5ylm-rqb5
Phys. Rev. B - Accepted 30 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5ylm-rqb5
Borophene, an outstanding platform to elucidate the structure-property relationship, possesses diverse concentration and spatial arrangement of hexagonal vacancies (HVs) owing to its structural polymorphism. Here, we study electron transport in disordered borophene nanoribbons (BNRs) with two types of HVs distributed randomly on a triangular lattice, namely unrestricted HVs and restricted ones. Unrestricted HVs which distribute stochastically at all spatially allowed sites function as strong scatterers and lead to Anderson localization over the entire energy spectrum. In contrast, confining HVs to predefined sites separated by a fixed distance preserves quantized conductance peaks associated with resonant tunneling, although the overall transmission ability is reduced. The magnitude of these quantized resonant peaks is robust against the HV probability, nanoribbon length, disorder configuration, and inhomogeneous model parameters, while their position and number are tunable via the fixed distance and nanoribbon width. Remarkably, the transmission ability around resonant energies could be enhanced by the HV probability, revealing a counterintuitive regime of HV-enhanced electron transport. The underlying physics can be understood from local current distributions and wavefunction analysis, indicating the emergence of distinct transmission modes arising from specific arrangement of HVs. In particular, we reveal a new resonant mechanism mediated by extended states whose amplitudes strictly vanish at predefined HV sites, rendering electronic transport entirely unaffected by defect scattering. These results establish HV engineering as an alternative route to manipulate quantum transport in disordered BNRs, with potential relevance to other triangular lattices, such as transition-metal dichalcogenides and moiré materials.
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