Charge Carriers in Few-Layer Graphene Films

The nature of the charge carriers in 2D few-layer graphites (FLGs) has been recently questioned by transport measurements [K. S. Novoselov et al., Science 306, 666 (2004)] and a strong ambipolar electric field effect has been revealed. Our density functional calculations demonstrate that the electronic band dispersion near the Fermi level, and consequently the nature of the charge carriers, is highly sensitive to the number of layers and the stacking geometry. We show that the experimentally observed ambipolar transport is only possible for an FLG with a Bernal-like stacking pattern, whereas simple-carrier or semiconducting behavior is predicted for other geometries.