Improved photoresponse with enhanced photoelectric contribution in fully suspended graphene photodetectors

Graphene's unique optoelectronic properties are promising to realize photodetectors with ultrafast photoresponse over a wide spectral range from far-infrared to ultraviolet radiation. The underlying mechanism of the photoresponse has been a particular focus of recent work and was found to be either photoelectric or photo-thermoelectric in nature and enhanced by hot carrier effects. Graphene supported by a substrate was found to be dominated by the photo-thermoelectric effect, which is known to be an order of magnitude slower than the photoelectric effect. Here we demonstrate fully-suspended chemical vapor deposition grown graphene microribbon arrays that are dominated by the faster photoelectric effect. Substrate removal was found to enhance the photoresponse by four-fold compared to substrate-supported microribbons. Furthermore, we show that the light-current input/output curves give valuable information about the underlying photophysical process responsible for the generated photocurrent. These findings are promising towards wafer-scale fabrication of graphene photodetectors approaching THz cut-off frequencies.

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