Optical second-harmonic generation induced by electric current in graphene on Si and SiC substrates

Abstract

We find that the flow of direct electric current (dc) through graphene on substrate enhances surface optical second-harmonic generation (SHG) from the graphene/substrate system. The current can enhance surface SHG by about 300% for a chemical-vapor-deposition (CVD) graphene monolayer on a SiO${}_{2}/\mathrm{Si}(001)$ substrate, and by about 25% for an epitaxial four-layer-graphene film on a 3.5\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}-miscut vicinal SiC(0001) substrate. The enhancement in both the CVD and epitaxial graphene samples is due to electric field-induced SHG, which is produced by the current-associated vertical electric field at the SiO${}_{2}/$Si interface or at the graphene/SiC interface. Measurements of rotational-anisotropy SHG (RA-SH) from both samples revealed that the current-induced SHG varies strongly with the measurement location along the current flow direction. By measuring RA-SH from the vicinal SiC(0001) substrate, we determined all three second-order susceptibility tensor elements (${d}_{33}$ = \ensuremath{-}52.0 pm/V, ${d}_{15}$ = 20.0 pm/V, and ${d}_{31}$ = 18.7 pm/V) that characterize the SHG response of hexagonal SiC at the fundamental wavelength of 740 nm. We further determined the three effective susceptibility tensor elements (${d}_{33}$ = \ensuremath{-}135.8 pm/V, ${d}_{15}$ = 18.5 pm/V, and ${d}_{31}$ = 14.6 pm/V) that characterize the surface SHG from the graphene/vicinal-SiC(0001) sample and finally showed that the current-dependent tensor element ${d}_{33}$ can be enhanced to a large value of ${d}_{33}$ = \ensuremath{-}199.0 pm/V by electric current in epitaxial graphene.