Tunneling photo-thermoelectric effect in monolayer graphene/bilayer hexagonal boron nitride/bilayer graphene asymmetric van der Waals tunnel junctions

Abstract

Graphene exhibits a pronounced photo-thermoelectric effect (PTE) in its in-plane carrier transport and has attracted attention toward various optoelectronic applications. In this study, we demonstrate an out-of-plane PTE by utilizing electron tunneling across a barrier, namely, the tunneling photo-thermoelectric effect (TPTE). This was achieved in a monolayer graphene (MLG)/bilayer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN)/bilayer graphene (BLG) asymmetric tunnel junction. MLG and BLG exhibit different cyclotron resonance (CR) optical absorption energies when their energies are Landau quantized under an out-of-plane magnetic field. We tuned the magnetic field under mid-infrared irradiation to bring MLG into CR conditions, whereas BLG was not in CR. The CR absorption in the MLG generates an electron temperature difference between the MLG and BLG and induces an out-of-plane TPTE voltage across the h-BN tunnel barrier. The TPTE exhibited a unique dependence on the Fermi energy of the MLG, which differed from that of the in-plane PTE of the MLG. The TPTE signal was large when the Fermi energy of the MLG was tuned near the transition between the quantum Hall state (QHS) and non-QHS. The TPTE allows one to measure the PTE on vertically stacked tunnel junctions, thus providing another degree of freedom for probing the electronic and optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional material heterostructures.