Graphene triangular ballistic rectifier: fabrication and characterization

It has been shown that graphene can demonstrate ballistic transport at room temperature. This opens up a range of practical applications that do not require graphene to have a band gap, which is one of the most significant challenges for its use in the electronics industry. Here, the very latest high mobility graphene (>100,000 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹) fabrication techniques will be demonstrated so that one such device, called the triangular ballistic rectifier (TBR), can be characterised. The TBR is a four-terminal device with a triangular anti-dot at their intersection; two sides of the triangle are positioned and angled such that ballistic carriers from the two input electrodes are redirected like billiard balls to one of the two output contacts irrespective of the instantaneous polarity of the input. A responsivity of 2400 mV mW⁻¹ is demonstrated at room temperature from a low-frequency input signal. The ballistic nature of the device is justified and explained in more detail with low-temperature measurements.