English

Photocarrier thermalization bottleneck in graphene

Materials Science 2019-04-17 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We present an ab-initio study of photocarrier dynamics in graphene due to electron-phonon (EP) interactions. Using the Boltzmann relaxation-time approximation with parameters determined from density functional theory (DFT) and a complementary, explicitly solvable model we show that the photocarrier thermalization time changes by orders of magnitude, when the excitation energy is reduced from 1 eV to the 100 meV range. In detail, the ultrafast thermalization at low temperatures takes place on a femtosecond timescale via optical phonon emission, but slows down to picoseconds once excitation energies become comparable with these optical phonon energy quanta. In the latter regime, thermalization times exhibit a pronounced dependence on temperature. Our DFT model includes all the inter- and intraband transitions due to EP scattering. Thanks to the high melting point of graphene we extend our studies up to 2000~K and show that such high temperatures reduce the photocarrier thermalization time through phonon absorption.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.07467,
  title  = {Photocarrier thermalization bottleneck in graphene},
  author = {Dinesh Yadav and Maxim Trushin and Fabian Pauly},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.07467},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:29:31.921Z