Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in the effect of atmospheric gases on the properties of graphene. We investigate the electrical and optical response of graphene-based field effect transistors that have been exposed to high purity oxygen gas using a combination of ultrafast two-pulse correlation (to give high temporal resolution) and low-frequency transport measurements (to monitor the photoinduced changes in the Fermi level). By measuring the Fermi level shifts, we are only sensitive to the oxygen atoms that interact directly with the surface. We compare our results to predictions of the empirical friction model for molecular desorption. We show the time scale of the relaxation associated with oxygen desorption to be $\sim 100$ fs, suggesting the desorption proceeds through hot electron generation in the graphene rather than heating of the lattice through hot phonon generation.

• Received 8 March 2014
• Revised 4 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.081401