Regular Article THE EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL B

Abstract. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulations we study numerically and analytically a photogalvanic effect, or ratchet, of directed electron transport induced by a microwave radiation on a semidisk Galton board of antidots in graphene. A comparison between usual two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) and electrons in graphene shows that ratchet currents are comparable at very low temperatures. However, a large mean free path in graphene should allow to have a strong ratchet transport at room temperatures. Also in graphene the ratchet transport emerges even for unpolarized radiation. These properties open promising possibilities for room temperature graphene based sensitive photogalvanic detectors of microwave and terahertz radiation. Graphene [1] is a new two-dimensional material with a va-riety of fascinating physical properties (see e.g. [2]). One of them is a relativistic dispersion law for electron dy-namics with an effective “light ” velocity s ≈ 108 cm/s [3], another is a high mobility at room temperature which in suspended graphene reaches μ ≈ 200 000 cm2/V s [4–6]. Our theoretical studies predict that these properties lea