Direct Observation of High Photoresponsivity in Pure Graphene Photodetectors

Ultrafast and broad spectral bandwidth photodetectors are desirable attributable to their unique bandstructures. Photodetectors based on graphene have great potential due to graphene’s outstanding optical and electrical properties. However, the highest reported values of the photoresponsivity of pure graphene are less than 10 mA/W at room temperature, which significantly limits its potential applications. Here, we report a photoresponsivity of 32 A/W in pure monolayer graphene photodetectors, an improvement of over one order of magnitude for functional graphene nanostructures (<3 A/W). The high photocurrent generation in our devices can be attributed to the high sensitivity of graphene’s resistivity to a local change of the electric field induced by photo-excited carriers generated in the light-doping substrate. This dramatically increases the feasibility of using graphene for the next generation of photodetectors.