Giant tunnel-electron injection in nitrogen-doped graphene

Scanning tunneling microscopy experiments have been performed to measure the local electron injection in nitrogen-doped graphene on SiC(0001¯) and were successfully compared to ab initio calculations. In graphene, a gaplike feature is measured around the Fermi level due to a phonon-mediated tunneling channel. At nitrogen sites, this feature vanishes due to an increase of the elastic channel that is allowed because of symmetry breaking induced by the nitrogen atoms. A large conductance enhancement by a factor of up to 500 was measured at the Fermi level by comparing local spectroscopy at nitrogen sites and at carbon sites. Nitrogen doping can therefore be proposed as a way to improve tunnel-electron injection in graphene.