Ultra-sensitive and Wide Bandwidth Thermal Measurements of Graphene at Low Temperatures

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultra-sensitive microwave Johnson noise thermometry method to measure the thermal and thermodynamic properties of graphene's electron gas at low temperatures, revealing insights into electron-phonon coupling and heat capacity.

Contribution

It presents a novel wide-bandwidth, high-resolution noise thermometry technique for probing low-temperature thermal transport in graphene, enabling new applications in bolometry and quantum measurement.

Findings

Measured electron-phonon coupling from 2-30 K.

Determined electron gas heat capacity at 5 K.

Achieved temperature resolution of 4 mK/√Hz with 80 MHz bandwidth.

Abstract

Graphene is a material with remarkable electronic properties and exceptional thermal transport properties near room temperature, which have been well examined and understood. However at very low temperatures the thermodynamic and thermal transport properties are much less well explored and somewhat surprisingly, is expected to exhibit extreme thermal isolation. Here we demonstrate an ultra-sensitive, wide-bandwidth measurement scheme to probe the thermal transport and thermodynamic properties of the electron gas of graphene. We employ Johnson noise thermometry at microwave frequency to sensitively measure the temperature of the electron gas with resolution of $4 mK/\sqrt{Hz}$ and a bandwidth of 80 MHz. We have measured the electron-phonon coupling from 2-30 K at a charge density of $2\cdot 10^{11} cm^{-2}$. Utilizing bolometric mixing, we have sensed temperature oscillations with period of 430 ps and have determined the heat capacity of the electron gas to be $2\cdot 10^{-21} J/(K\cdot \mu m^2)$ at 5 K which is consistent with that of a two dimensional, Dirac electron gas. These measurements suggest that graphene-based devices together with wide bandwidth noise thermometry can generate substantial advances in the areas of ultra-sensitive bolometry, calorimetry, microwave and terahertz photo-detection, and bolometric mixing for applications in areas such as observational astronomy and quantum information and measurement.