Significant excitonic effects were observed in graphene by measuring its optical conductivity in a broad spectral range including the two-dimensional {\pi}-band saddle-point singularities in the electronic structure. The strong electron-hole interactions manifest themselves in an asymmetric resonance peaked at 4.62 eV, which is red-shifted by nearly 600 meV from the value predicted by ab-initio GW calculations for the band-to-band transitions. The observed excitonic resonance is explained within a phenomenological model as a Fano interference of a strongly coupled excitonic state and a band continuum. Our experiment also showed a weak dependence of the excitonic resonance in few-layer graphene on layer thickness. This result reflects the effective cancellation of the increasingly screened repulsive electron-electron (e-e) and attractive electron-hole (e-h) interactions.
@article{arxiv.1012.2922,
title = {Seeing many-body effects in single- and few-layer graphene: Observation of two-dimensional saddle-point excitons},
author = {Kin Fai Mak and Jie Shan and Tony F. Heinz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.2922},
year = {2015}
}