Dynamics of photoexcited carriers in graphene

TL;DR

This study models the ultrafast nonequilibrium dynamics of carriers and phonons in graphene, revealing rapid thermalization, distinct phonon temperatures, and relaxation behaviors consistent with experimental observations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed microscopic kinetic model including Coulomb and carrier-phonon interactions, elucidating the relaxation processes and phonon temperature differences in photoexcited graphene.

Findings

Fermi distribution established within 100 fs

Fast relaxation due to carrier-phonon thermalization

Slow decay linked to hot phonons

Abstract

The nonequilibrium dynamics of carriers and phonons in graphene is investigated by solving the microscopic kinetic equations with the carrier-phonon and carrier-carrier Coulomb scatterings explicitly included. The Fermi distribution of hot carriers are found to be established within 100 fs and the temperatures of electrons in the conduction and valence bands are very close to each other, even when the excitation density and the equilibrium density are comparable, thanks to the strong inter-band Coulomb scattering. Moreover, the temporal evolutions of the differential transmission obtained from our calculations agree with the experiments by Wang et al. [Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 081917 (2010)] and Hale et al. [Phys. Rev. B 83, 121404 (2011)] very well, with two distinct differential transmission relaxations presented. We show that the fast relaxation is due to the rapid carrier-phonon thermalization and the slow one is mainly because of the slow decay of hot phonons. In addition, it is found that the temperatures of the hot phonons in different branches are different and the temperature of hot carriers can be even lower than that of the hottest phonons. Finally, we show that the slow relaxation rate exhibits a mild valley in the excitation density dependence and is linearly dependent on the probe-photon energy.