Plasma transport in graphene conduction channels and application for the detection of Terahertz signals

The conduction channel of a field effect transistor (FET) can act as a plasma resonator for density oscillations in a quasi-two-dimensional electron gas. It has been proposed and demonstrated experimentally with the semiconductor transistor structures, that the hydrodynamic nonlinearities of the plasma transport can have a rectifying effect and induce a constant source-to-drain voltage in response to the time-harmonic component in the gate-to-channel potential. The quality of the resonance is limited by scattering on phonons and impurities and energy transfer to single particle excitations. As the result the recent demonstrations of resonant plasma response to THz radiation have been limited to low temperatures. It may be advantages to make use of unusual high-frequency properties and relatively high room temperature mobility of the two-dimensional electron or hole gas in graphene based heterostructures.