2 research outputs found
Electronic Cooling via Interlayer Coulomb Coupling in Multilayer Epitaxial Graphene
In van der Waals bonded or rotationally disordered multilayer stacks of
two-dimensional (2D) materials, the electronic states remain tightly confined
within individual 2D layers. As a result, electron-phonon interactions occur
primarily within layers and interlayer electrical conductivities are low. In
addition, strong covalent in-plane intralayer bonding combined with weak van
der Waals interlayer bonding results in weak phonon-mediated thermal coupling
between the layers. We demonstrate here, however, that Coulomb interactions
between electrons in different layers of multilayer epitaxial graphene provide
an important mechanism for interlayer thermal transport even though all
electronic states are strongly confined within individual 2D layers. This
effect is manifested in the relaxation dynamics of hot carriers in ultrafast
time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy. We develop a theory of interlayer Coulomb
coupling containing no free parameters that accounts for the experimentally
observed trends in hot-carrier dynamics as temperature and the number of layers
is varied.Comment: 54 pages, 15 figures, uses documentclass{achemso}, M.T.M. and J.R.T.
contributed equally to this wor
ARTICLE Microscopic origins of the terahertz carrier relaxation and cooling dynamics in graphene
The ultrafast dynamics of hot carriers in graphene are key to both understanding of fundamental carrier-carrier interactions and carrier-phonon relaxation processes in two-dimensional materials, and understanding of the physics underlying novel high-speed electronic and optoelectronic devices. Many recent experiments on hot carriers using terahertz spectroscopy and related techniques have interpreted the variety of observed signals within phenomenological frameworks, and sometimes invoke extrinsic effects such as disorder. Here, we present an integrated experimental and theoretical programme, using ultrafast timeresolved terahertz spectroscopy combined with microscopic modelling, to systematically investigate the hot-carrier dynamics in a wide array of graphene samples having varying amounts of disorder and with either high or low doping levels. The theory reproduces the observed dynamics quantitatively without the need to invoke any fitting parameters, phenomenological models or extrinsic effects such as disorder. We demonstrate that the dynamics are dominated by the combined effect of efficient carrier-carrier scattering, which maintains a thermalized carrier distribution, and carrier-optical-phonon scattering, which removes energy from the carrier liquid