Performance enhancement of graphene/Ge near-infrared photodetector by modulating the doping level of graphene

In this paper, we improved the performance of a near-infrared graphene/germanium heterojunction photodetector at atmospheric pressure and at room temperature. We applied graphene with p-type chemical doping (doping chemical: polyacrylic acid) to lower the graphene Fermi level and increase the Schottky barrier formed at the junction with Ge. The responsivity at 1550 nm is improved from 0.87 to 1.27 A/W after the doping process. At the same time, the dark current is reduced by 20 times and the detectivity of the optimized device is improved to 9.6 x 10(9) Jones, which is 540% improvement compared to the undoped graphene device. With the result of improving performance through this simple process, it will be able to contribute to the fabrication of highly reactive graphene/semiconductor based photodetectors and the development of near-infrared sensors. (c) 2022 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

In this paper, we improved the performance of a near-infrared graphene/germanium heterojunction photodetector by doping graphene with p-type chemical, which lowered the Fermi level and increased the Schottky barrier. The responsivity and detectivity were significantly improved, making it valuable for the development of graphene/semiconductor based photodetectors and near-infrared sensors.