Photo-induced Modulation Doping in Graphene/Boron nitride Heterostructures*

Van der Waals heterostructures (VDH) provide an exciting new platform for materials engineering, where a variety of layered materials with different electrical, optical and mechanical responses can be stacked together to enable new physics and novel functionalities. We report an emerging optoelectronic phenomenon (i.e. photo-induced modulation doping) in the graphene-boron nitride VDH (G/BN heterostructure). We find it enables flexible and repeatable writing and erasing of charge doping in graphene with optical light. We show that the photo-induced modulation doping maintains the remarkable carrier mobility of the G/BN heterostructure, and it can be used to generate spatially varying doping profiles like pn junctions. Our work contributes towards understanding light matter interactions in VDHs, and introduces a simple technique for creating inhomogeneous doping in high mobility graphene devices.