  We present a first-principles study of the migration and recombination of
edge defects (carbon adatom and/or vacancy) and their influence on electrical
conductance in zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs). It is found that at room
temperature, the adatom is quite mobile while the vacancy is almost immobile
along the edge of ZGNRs. The recombination of an adatom-vacancy pair leads to a
pentagon-heptagon ring defect structure having a lower energy than the perfect
edge, implying that such an edge-defect can be formed spontaneously. This edge
defect can suppresses the conductance of ZGNRs drastically, which provides some
useful hints for understanding the observed semiconducting behavior of the
fabricated narrow GNRs.
