Tunable optical absorption and interactions in graphene via oxygen plasma

Abstract

We report significant changes of optical conductivity (σ1) in single-layer graphene induced by mild oxygen plasma exposure and explore the interplay between carrier doping, disorder, and many-body interactions from their signatures in the absorption spectrum. The first distinctive effect is the reduction of the excitonic binding energy that can be extracted from the renormalized saddle point resonance at 4.64 eV. Secondly, σ1 is nearly completely suppressed (σ1â‰σ0) below an exposure-dependent threshold in the near-infrared range. The clear steplike suppression follows the Pauli blocking behavior expected for doped monolayer graphene. The nearly zero residual conductivity below ω ∼ 2EF can be interpreted as arising from the weakening of the electronic self-energy. Our data shows that mild oxygen exposure can be used to controllably dope graphene without introducing the strong physical and chemical changes that are common in other approaches to oxidized graphene, allowing a controllable manipulation of the optical properties of graphene.©2014 American Physical Society.