Tunable High Workfunction Contacts: Doped Graphene

Merid Belayneh¹, Sergey Rashkeev¹, Feras Al-Dirini² Fahhad Alharbi^{2, 3
1}Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa
University, Doha, Qatar.
²Electrical Engineering Department, King Fahd University for Petroleum and
Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
³K.A.CARE Energy Research & Innovation Center, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Contact electrodes with high workfunctions can enable significant enhancement in optoelectronic device performance due to their
important role in efficient extracting/injecting carriers especially from optically active materials. With such materials becoming increasingly
important in emerging solar cell technologies, the need for high workfunction electrodes has become of timely importance. In this work, p-doped graphene is investigated using first principles calculations, as a potential high workfunction contact electrode material for device applications. We found that chemical doping based on the adsorption of different non-metallic adatoms on graphene allows tuning the workfunction which can reach as high as 5.76 eV due to charge transfer from the graphene to the p-dopants. Therefore, our results are necessary to bring out the capabilities graphene-based electrodes.