Tunable optical absorption and interactions in graphene via oxygen plasma

Abstract

We report significant changes of optical conductivity in single layer graphene induced by mild oxygen plasma exposure, and explore the interplay between carrier doping, disorder, and many-body interactions from their signatures in the absorption spectrum. The first distinctive effect is the reduction of the excitonic binding energy that can be extracted from the renormalized saddle point resonance at 4.64 eV. Secondly, the real part of the frequency-dependent conductivity is nearly completely suppressed below an exposure-dependent threshold in the near infrared range. The clear step-like suppression follows the Pauli blocking behaviour expected for doped monolayer graphene. The nearly zero residual conductivity at frequencies below 2Ef can be interpreted as arising from the weakening of the electronic self-energy. Our data shows that mild oxygen exposure can be used to controlably dope graphene without introducing the strong physical and chemical changes that are common in other approaches to oxidized graphene, allowing a controllable manipulation of the optical properties of graphene.