Gate-Tunable Graphene Hall Sensors with High Magnetic Field Sensitivity

TL;DR

This paper presents graphene-based Hall sensors that maintain high magnetic field sensitivity across a wide temperature range and in strong magnetic fields, with tunable sensitivity via electrostatic gating.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel graphene Hall sensor with tunable sensitivity that operates effectively from cryogenic to room temperatures and in magnetic fields up to several Tesla.

Findings

Achieved sensitivity of 80 nT/Hz^{1/2} at 4.2 K

Maintained sensitivity of 700 nT/Hz^{1/2} at room temperature

Demonstrated high sensitivity in magnetic fields up to 3 Tesla

Abstract

Solid-state magnetic field sensors are important to both modern electronics and fundamental materials science. Many types of these sensors maintain high sensitivity only in a limited range of temperature and background magnetic field, but Hall-effect sensors are in principle able to operate over a broad range of these conditions. Here, we fabricate and characterize micrometer-scale graphene Hall sensors demonstrating high magnetic field sensitivity from liquid-helium to room temperature and in background magnetic field up to several Tesla. By tuning the charge carrier density with an electrostatic gate, we optimize the magnetic field sensitivity for different working conditions. From measurements of the Hall coefficient and the Hall voltage noise at 1 kHz, we estimate an optimum magnetic field sensitivity of 80 nT Hz$^{-1/2}$ at 4.2 K, 700 nT Hz$^{-1/2}$ at room temperature, and 3 $\mu$T Hz$^{-1/2}$ in 3 T background magnetic field at 4.2 K. Our devices perform competitively with the best existing Hall sensor technologies at room temperature, outperform any Hall sensors reported in the literature at 4.2 K, and demonstrate high sensitivity for the first time in a few Tesla applied magnetic field.