Graphene, the hexagonal 2D structure of Carbon atoms, have attracted a huge amount of attention among physicists and engineers since 2003, when it was successfully extracted by Novoselove et.al. Graphene benefits from many fantastic properties such as super-high mobility, gate-tunable chemical potential, and zero band-gap near the Dirac points. Another characteristic of Graphene that has been investigated by many researchers in recent years is its high capability of supporting hot carriers (electrons and holes with energies higher than the Fermi energy) which has been utilized widely in photodetection. As my master’s thesis, I have worked on improving the responsivity of a Graphene-based photodetector in the telecommunication band (1550 nm). Based on the literature, in the circumstances that we consider in our analysis, photothermoelectric current, related to hot carriers, is considerably more powerful than photovoltaic current. The first step of the project was deeply understanding the concept of hot carriers and finding a robust theoretical analysis of photothermoelectric current in Graphene. After this, we proposed different ways to enrich the power coupling on Graphene layer such as using plasmonic effects or coupling waveguides. Key Word: Photodetection, Hot Carriers, Photothermoelectric Effect, Photovoltaic Effect, Graghene
