Electronic properties of a patchwork of armchair graphene nanoribbon and triangular boron nitride nanoflake

Calculations have been performed for a patchwork of armchair graphene nanoribbon and triangular boron nitride nanoflake (BNNF) using density functional theory. It is found that various exotic electronic ground states near the Fermi level appear, and interestingly such electronic structures can be tuned by controlling the size and concentration of the embedding triangular BNNF which can produce spin polarisedunpolarised transitions, whereas electronic structures of patchwork graphene embedded with triangular BNNF are not spin polarised. Such a phenomenon originates from synergistic effects (a charge transfer effect and a nanoribbon edge effect), which suggests one possible way for band gap engineering for nanoelectronic device applications.