Momentum-resolved linear dichroism in bilayer MoS2

In solid state photoemission experiments it is possible to extract information about the symmetry and orbital character of the electronic wave functions via the photoemission selection rules that shape the measured intensity. This approach can be expanded in a pump-probe experiment where the intensity contains additional information about interband excitations induced by an ultrafast laser pulse with tunable polarization. Here, we find an unexpected strong linear dichroism effect (up to 42.4%) in the conduction band of bilayer MoS2, when measuring energy- A nd momentum-resolved snapshots of excited electrons by time- A nd angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. We model the polarization-dependent photoemission intensity in the transiently populated conduction band using the semiconductor Bloch equations. Our theoretical analysis reveals a strongly anisotropic momentum dependence of the optical excitations due to intralayer single-particle hopping, which explains the observed linear dichroism

Electron-phonon coupling in quasi-free-standing graphene

Quasi-free-standing monolayer graphene can be produced by intercalating species like oxygen or hydrogen between epitaxial graphene and the substrate crystal. If the graphene was indeed decoupled from the substrate, one would expect the observation of a similar electronic dispersion and many-body effects, irrespective of the substrate and the material used to achieve the decoupling. Here we investigate the electron-phonon coupling in two different types of quasi-free-standing monolayer graphene: decoupled from SiC via hydrogen intercalation and decoupled from Ir via oxygen intercalation. The two systems show similar overall behaviours of the self-energy and a weak renormalization of the bands near the Fermi energy. The electron-phonon coupling is found to be so weak that it renders the precise determination of the coupling constant λ through renormalization difficult. The estimated value of λ is 0.05(3) for both systems. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd