English

Photoexcitation Cascade and Quantum-Relativistic Jets in Graphene

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-02-16 v1

Abstract

In Dirac materials linear band dispersion blocks momentum-conserving interband transitions, creating a bottleneck for electron-hole pair production and carrier multiplication in the photoexcitation cascade. Here we show that the decays are unblocked and the bottleneck is relieved by subtle many-body effects involving multiple off-shell e-h pairs. The decays result from a collective behavior due to emission of many soft pairs. We discuss characteristic signatures of the off-shell pathways, in particular the sharp angular distribution of secondary carriers, resembling relativistic jets in high-energy physics. The jets can be directly probed using solid-state equivalent of particle detectors. Collinear scattering enhances carrier multiplication, allowing for emission of as many as 10{\sim}10 secondary carriers per single absorbed photon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.03758,
  title  = {Photoexcitation Cascade and Quantum-Relativistic Jets in Graphene},
  author = {Cyprian Lewandowski and L. S. Levitov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.03758},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures