Anomalously strong pinning of the filling factor nu=2 in epitaxial graphene

T. J. B. M. Janssen, A. Tzalenchuk, R. Yakimova, S. Kubatkin, S. Lara-Avila, S. Kopylov, V. Fal'ko

Published 2010-09-17, updated 2011-05-17Version 3

We explore the robust quantization of the Hall resistance in epitaxial graphene grown on Si-terminated SiC. Uniquely to this system, the dominance of quantum over classical capacitance in the charge transfer between the substrate and graphene is such that Landau levels (in particular, the one at exactly zero energy) remain completely filled over an extraordinarily broad range of magnetic fields. One important implication of this pinning of the filling factor is that the system can sustain a very high nondissipative current. This makes epitaxial graphene ideally suited for quantum resistance metrology, and we have achieved a precision of 3 parts in 10^10 in the Hall resistance quantization measurements.