Electronic conductance of twisted bilayer nanoribbon flakes

We study the transport properties of a twisted bilayer graphene flake contacted by two monolayer nanoribbons which act as leads. We analyze the conductance in terms of the spectra of the bilayer nanoribbon and the monolayer contacts. The low-energy transport properties are governed by the edge states with AB stacking. Remarkably, the electronic conductance in this energy region does not depend much on the relative position of the leads, in contrast with that of bilayer flakes with more symmetric stackings. We attribute this feature to the localization of these low-energy states in the AB edge regions of the flake, having a much smaller weight at the junctions between the flake and the nanoribbon leads.This work was partially supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (The “Mobility Plus” Program) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant No. FIS2012-33521. E.S.M. acknowledges FONDECYT Grant 11130129