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Reply to: Dirac-point photocurrents due to photothermoelectric effect in non-uniform graphene devices

Nature Nanotechnology volume 15, pages 244–246 (2020)Cite this article

The Original Article was published on 17 February 2020

replying to M. S. Fuhrer & N. V. Medekhar Nature Nanotechnology https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0637-1 (2020)

In Ma et al.1 we presented the observation of a strong, universal photocurrent in undoped graphene and provided a theoretical understanding that can accommodate all our basic experimental observations. Fuhrer and Medhekar2 argue that certain parts of our experiment can be understood in terms of the photothermoelectric (PTE) effect in the presence of an unintentional spatial charge inhomogeneity due to fringing electric fields. Here we demonstrate that the mechanism proposed is in direct contradiction with our published experimental data, and hence cannot be correct. In addition, we show additional data (not shown in ref. 1) that further explicitly falsify the mechanism proposed in ref. 2.

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Fig. 1: Simulated R and PC as a function of VBG for different values of VD according to the model proposed by Fuhrer and Medhekar2.
Fig. 2: Additional experimental data that disagree with the model proposed by Fuhrer and Medhekar2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Qiong Ma & Pablo Jarillo-Herrero

  2. Division of Physics & Applied Physics, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Justin C. W. Song

  3. Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology, & Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Justin C. W. Song

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

    Nathaniel M. Gabor

Authors
  1. Qiong Ma
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  2. Justin C. W. Song
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  3. Nathaniel M. Gabor
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  4. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero
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Contributions

Q.M. carried out the measurements and analyses, with the help of J.C.W.S., N.M.G. and P.J.H. All authors wrote the manuscript together.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.

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Ma, Q., Song, J.C.W., Gabor, N.M. et al. Reply to: Dirac-point photocurrents due to photothermoelectric effect in non-uniform graphene devices. Nat. Nanotechnol. 15, 244–246 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0638-0

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