2Light absorption in graphene causes a large change in electron temperature, due to low electronic heat capacity and weak electron phonon coupling, 1-3 making it very attractive as a hot-electron bolometer material. Unfortunately, the weak variation of electrical resistance with temperature has substantially limited the responsivity of graphene bolometers. Here we show that quantum dots of epitaxial graphene on SiC exhibit an extraordinarily high variation of resistance with temperature due to quantum confinement, higher than 430 M K -1 at 2.5 K, leading to responsivities for absorbed THz power above 1 × 10 10 V W -1 . This is five orders of magnitude higher than other types of graphene hot electron bolometers. The high responsivity combined with an extremely low noise-equivalent power, about 2 × 10 -16 W/√Hz at 2.5K, place the performance of graphene quantum dot bolometers well above commercial cooled bolometers. Additionally, these quantum dot bolometers have the potential for superior performance for operation above 77K.The electrical resistivity of pristine graphene shows a weak temperature dependence, varying by less than 30% (200% for suspended graphene) from 30 mK to room temperature 4,5 , because of the very weak electron-phonon scattering 6 . A stronger temperature dependence was obtained either by using dual-gated bilayer graphene 1,7 to create a tunable band gap 7 , or by introducing defects to induce strong localization 2 . Both schemes have successfully produced bolometric detection, with responsivities up to 2 × 10 5 V W -1 and temperature coefficient for the resistance as high as 22 kK -1 at 1.5K 1,2 . These devices required the use of multilayer structures adding complexity. In the case of bilayer graphene, top and bottom gates were needed to electrically induce a bandgap. In the case of disordered graphene, a boron nitride layer was used as a tunneling barrier between the graphene and the electrodes to reduce thermal conductance due to diffusion of the electrons to the electrodes.
3Here we demonstrate hot-electron bolometric detection using nano-patterned dots of epitaxial graphene. A bandgap is induced via quantum confinement, without the need of gates, using a simple single-layer structure. We study the THz response of dots with diameter varying from 30 nm to 700 nm, at 0.15 THz and at temperatures from 2.5K to 80K. These devices are extremely sensitive and the responsivity increases by decreasing the dot diameter, with the smaller dots still showing a clear response at liquid nitrogen temperature. Our fabrication process is fully scalable and easily provides multiple devices on the same chip, making it suitable for bolometer arrays. Moreover, its flexibility allows patterning of arrays of dots electrically connected in parallel, to control the device impedance while preserving the strong temperature dependence.We fabricated our dots using e-beam lithography and a process developed by Yang et al., 8 (see Methods). Fig. 1a shows an image of a typical quantum dot and the temperature dependenc...