The twofold nature of Coulomb scattering in graphene

The ultrafast dynamics in graphene, which is of great interest from both a fundamental as well as an application oriented point of view, has been studied intensively during the last years and ascinating effects such as carrier multiplication have been found. Here we focus on the Coulomb scattering dynamics in the energetic vicinity of the Dirac point. Utilizing an optical anisotropy, we reveal the twofold nature of Coulomb scattering in graphene by polarization resolved pump-probe experiments. Coulomb scattering is the main mechanism that transforms an optical excited non-equilibrium carrier distribution into a thermalized one and dominates the initial carrier dynamics. Many publications report extremely fast Coulomb scattering rates and thermalization times in the order of tens of fs often only estimated because of limited time resolution in experiments. This is comprehensible as the linear band structure of graphene allows carriers to scatter along a line easily since this inherently fulfils energy and momentum conservation. However, in case of excitation with linearly polarized light, the initial carrier distribution is anisotropic in k space. This means thermalization needs also a redistribution in momentum direction additionally to the equilibration in energy. When scattering with optical phonons is suppressed by photo excitation at low energy, noncollinear Coulomb scattering is limiting the thermalization time to surprisingly long times (several ps) [1]. This contrasting behaviour, namely a fast equilibration in energy but a slow one in momentum space, is what we refer to as the twofold nature of Coulomb scattering in graphene.

[1] J. C. König-Otto, M. Mittendorff, T. Winzer, F. Kadi, E. Malic, A. Knorr, C. Berger, W. A. de Heer, A. Pashkin, H. Schneider, M. Helm, and S. Winnerl, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 087401 (2016).