Photon-assisted electron transport in graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates how an alternating current signal affects electron transport in graphene, revealing insights into energy-dependent transmission and potential observation of relativistic quantum effects like zitterbewegung.

Contribution

It introduces a scattering theory approach to analyze photon-assisted transport in graphene, linking ac signals to energy-dependent transmission and relativistic electron phenomena.

Findings

Photon-assisted transport reveals energy-dependent transmission in graphene.

The setup provides a method to probe relativistic effects like zitterbewegung.

Analysis suggests observable signatures of Dirac electron dynamics under ac signals.

Abstract

Photon-assisted electron transport in ballistic graphene is analyzed using scattering theory. We show that the presence of an ac signal (applied to a gate electrode in a region of the system) has interesting consequences on electron transport in graphene, where the low energy dynamics is described by the Dirac equation. In particular, such a setup describes a feasible way to probe energy dependent transmission in graphene. This is of substantial interest because the energy dependence of transmission in mesoscopic graphene is the basis of many peculiar transport phenomena proposed in the recent literature. Furthermore, we discuss the relevance of our analysis of ac transport in graphene to the observability of zitterbewegung of electrons that behave as relativistic particles (but with a lower effective speed of light).