Finding the bare band: Electron coupling to two phonon modes in potassium-doped graphene on Ir(111)

TL;DR

This study uses ARPES to analyze electron-phonon interactions in potassium-doped graphene on Ir(111), revealing coupling to two phonon modes and estimating the coupling strength, with implications for understanding doping effects.

Contribution

It introduces a recursive self-consistent method to extract the bare band and demonstrates electron coupling to two phonon modes in doped graphene on Ir(111).

Findings

Electron-phonon coupling constant ~0.2.

Coupling involves two distinct phonon modes.

Potassium intercalation does not increase scattering rate.

Abstract

We analyze renormalization of the pi band of n-doped epitaxial graphene on Ir(111) induced by electron-phonon coupling. Our procedure of extracting the bare band relies on recursive self-consistent refining of the functional form of the bare-band until the convergence. We demonstrate that the components of the self-energy, as well as the spectral intensity obtained from angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) show that the renormalization is due to the coupling to two distinct phonon excitations. From the velocity renormalization and an increase of the imaginary part of the self-energy we find the electron-phonon coupling constant to be ~0.2, which is in fair agreement with a previous study of the same system, despite the notable difference in the width of spectroscopic curves. Our experimental results also suggest that potassium intercalated between graphene and Ir(111) does not introduce any additional increase of the quasiparticle scattering rate.