A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) discovered that electrical conduction in graphene on the picosecond timescale is governed by the same basic laws that describe the thermal properties of gases. This understanding might allow scientists and engineers not only to better understand but also to improve the performance of graphene-based nanoelectronic devices.
The researchers found that the energy of ultrafast electrical currents passing through graphene is very efficiently converted into electron heat, making graphene electrons behave just like a hot gas. It appears that the heat is distributed evenly over all electrons, and the rise in electronic temperature, caused by the passing currents, in turn has a strong effect on the electrical conduction of graphene.
A constantly increasing demand for telecommunication bandwidth requires an ever faster operation of electronic devices, pushing their response times to be as short as a picosecond. The results of this study might help improve the performance of graphene-based nanoelectronic devices such as ultra-high speed transistors and photodetectors. In particular, they show the way for breaking the terahertz operation speed barrier for graphene transistors.