All carbon materials pn diode.

Abstract

Semiconductor pn junctions are elementary building blocks of many electronic devices such as transistors, solar cells, photodetectors, and integrated circuits. Due to the absence of an energy bandgap and massless Dirac-like behaviour of charge carriers, graphene pn junction with electrical current rectification characteristics is hardly achieved. Here we show a graphene pn junction diode can be made exclusively from carbon materials by laminating two layers of positively and negatively charged graphene oxides. As the interdiffusion of oppositely charged mobile counterions, a built-in potential is created to rectify the current by changing the tunnelling probability of electrons across the junction. This graphene diode is semi-transparent, can perform simple logic operations, and since it has carbon nanotubes electrodes, we demonstrate an all carbon materials pn diode. We expect this graphene diode will expand material choices and provide functionalities (e.g. grafting recognition units on graphene oxides) beyond that of traditional semiconductor pn junctions.