Enhanced Performance of a Visible Light Detector Made with Quasi-Free-Standing Graphene on SiC

The excellent optoelectronic properties of graphene give it great potential for applications in optical detection. Among the graphenes obtained through many synthetic methods, epitaxial graphene obtained by thermal decomposition on silicon carbide has remarkable advantages for preparing photodetectors. In this research, epitaxial graphene has been successfully prepared on a silicon surface (0001) of semi-insulating 4H-SiC substrate with a size of 10 mm × 10 mm and epitaxial graphene has been converted to quasi-free-standing graphene by hydrogen passivation. Two metal-graphene-metal photodetectors were fabricated using the two types of graphenes above and the photo-absorption properties of detectors have been investigated under 650-nm laser illumination with different illumination powers. From a comparison of the performances between the two detectors, it was found that a photodetector fabricated with quasi-free-standing graphene shows enhanced performance under a light power of 0.018 mW. Responsivity and external quantum efficiency reach maxima of 5.11 A/W and 9.74%, respectively. This dramatic improvement is mainly due to the disappearance of the buffer layer in epitaxial graphene, providing a new method to achieve optimization of graphene-based opto-electrical devices.