Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology Seminar Series

Graphene and other atomically thin materials like transition metal dichalcogenides have recently emerged as versatile building blocks for optoelectronics and light detection. For a gapless material like graphene, the electrons which absorb the incident radiation are weakly coupled to the thermal bath of phonons. Consequently, light absorption in graphene causes a substantial increase in electron temperature and occurs in a wide energy range, making it an ideal material for hot electron bolometer detectors. Ultra-sensitive broadband light sensors are widely needed in many fields. Here we show that graphene nanostructures into quantum dots yield hot electron bolometers with an extraordinary performance for broadband photo­detection, with a design that is easily scalable and suitable for detector arrays. A. El Fatimy et al., Nature Nanotechnology 11, 335-338 (2016)