Oh graphene! The cheap, easy-to-manufacture one-atom-thick sheet of carbon can add yet another weird, fantastical, and possibly life-changing ability to its list of characteristics: it has an incredibly sensitive thermoelectric response to light. In layman’s terms: graphene, when struck by light of almost any wavelength, can produce an electric current. The discovery was made by a team of researchers from MIT in the US and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. A sheet of graphene was treated so that it had two regions with different electrical properties (a p-n junction). Then, by shining an 850nm infrared laser on the material a temperature difference between the two regions is created, and an electrical current flows. This effect is caused by a hot carrier response, where the electrons gain enough energy to move, but the underlying lattice of carbon stays cool.
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