A general and simple method for evaluating the electrical transport performance of graphene by the van der Pauw–Hall measurement

Abstract

Expected for many promising applications in the field of electronics and optoelectronics, a reliable method for the characterization of graphene electrical transport properties is desired to predict its device performance or provide feedback for its synthesis. However, the commonly used methods of extracting carrier mobility from graphene field effect transistor or Hall-bar is time consuming, expensive, and significantly affected by the device fabrication process other than graphene itself. Here we reported a general and simple method to evaluate the electrical transport performance of graphene by the van der Pauw–Hall measurement. By annealing graphene in vacuum to remove the adsorbed dopants and then exposing it in ambient surroundings, carrier mobility as a function of density can be measured with the increase of carrier density due to the dopant re-adsorption from the surroundings. Further, the relationship between the carrier mobility and density can be simply fitted with a power equation to the first level approximation, with which any pair of measured carrier mobility and density can be normalized to an arbitrary carrier density for comparison. We experimentally demonstrated the reliability of the method, which is much simpler than making devices and may promote the standard making for graphene characterization.