Optical conductivity of single-layer graphene induced by temporal mass-gap fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper studies how random temporal fluctuations of the mass gap in single-layer graphene affect its optical conductivity, revealing frequency-dependent enhancement and suppression of electron transport.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-stochastic approach to calculate optical conductivity in graphene with time-dependent mass-gap fluctuations, extending previous static disorder models.

Findings

Intermediate frequencies see enhanced conductivity due to fluctuations

High and low frequencies experience suppressed conductivity with increased fluctuation variance

DC conductivity is always suppressed and vanishes at zero temperature

Abstract

We consider the dynamics of charge carriers in single-layer graphene that are subject to random temporal fluctuations of their mass gap. The optical conductivity is calculated by incorporating the quantum-stochastic time evolution into the standard linear-response (Kubo) theory. We find that, for an intermediate range of frequencies below the average gap size, electron transport is enhanced by fluctuations. At the same time, in the limit of high as well as low frequencies, the conductivity is suppressed as the variance of gap fluctuations increases. In particular, the dc conductivity is always suppressed by a random temporal mass with nonvanishing mean value and vanishes in the zero-temperature limit. Our results are complementary to those obtained recently for static random-gap disorder in finite-size systems.