No Arabic abstract
We study the carrier dynamics in epitaxially grown graphene in the range of photon energies from 10 - 250 meV. The experiments complemented by microscopic modeling reveal that the carrier relaxation is significantly slowed down as the photon energy is tuned to values below the optical phonon frequency, however, owing to the presence of hot carriers, optical phonon emission is still the predominant relaxation process. For photon energies about twice the value of the Fermi energy, a transition from pump-induced transmission to pump-induced absorption occurs due to the interplay of interband and intraband processes.
We investigate the ultrafast relaxation dynamics of hot Dirac fermionic quasiparticles in multilayer epitaxial graphene using ultrafast optical differential transmission spectroscopy. We observe DT spectra which are well described by interband transitions with no electron-hole interaction. Following the initial thermalization and emission of high-energy phonons, the electron cooling is determined by electron-acoustic phonon scattering, found to occur on the time scale of 1 ps for highly doped layers, and 4-11 ps in undoped layers. The spectra also provide strong evidence for the multilayer stucture and doping profile of thermally grown epitaxial graphene on SiC.
Multi-layer epitaxial graphene (MEG) is investigated using far infrared (FIR) transmission experiments in the different limits of low magnetic fields and high temperatures. The cyclotron-resonance like absorption is observed at low temperature in magnetic fields below 50 mT, allowing thus to probe the nearest vicinity of the Dirac point and to estimate the conductivity in nearly undoped graphene. The carrier mobility is found to exceed 250,000 cm$^2$/(V.s). In the limit of high temperatures, the well-defined Landau level (LL) quantization is observed up to room temperature at magnetic fields below 1 T, a phenomenon unique in solid state systems. A negligible increase in the width of the cyclotron resonance lines with increasing temperature indicates that no important scattering mechanism is thermally activated, supporting recent expectations of high room-temperature mobilities in graphene.
Excitation of magnons or spin-waves driven by nominally unpolarized transport currents in point contacts of normal and ferromagnetic metals is probed by irradiating the contacts with microwaves. Two characteristic dynamic effects are observed: a rectification of off-resonance microwave current by spin-wave nonlinearities in the point contact conductance, and a resonant stimulation of spin-wave modes in the nano-contact core by the microwave field. These observations provide a direct evidence that the magnetoconductance effects observed are due to GHz spin dynamics at the ferromagnetic interface driven by the spin transfer torque effect of the transport current.
Charge transport at the Dirac point in bilayer graphene exhibits two dramatically different transport states, insulating and metallic, that occur in apparently otherwise indistinguishable experimental samples. We demonstrate that the existence of these two transport states has its origin in an interplay between evanescent modes, that dominate charge transport near the Dirac point, and disordered configurations of extended defects in the form of partial dislocations. In a large ensemble of bilayer systems with randomly positioned partial dislocations, the conductivity distribution $P(sigma)$ is found to be strongly peaked at both the insulating and metallic limits. We argue that this distribution form, that occurs only at the Dirac point, lies at the heart of the observation of both metallic and insulating states in bilayer graphene.
We have investigated the disorder of epitaxial graphene close to the charge neutrality point (CNP) by various methods: i) at room temperature, by analyzing the dependence of the resistivity on the Hall coefficient ; ii) by fitting the temperature dependence of the Hall coefficient down to liquid helium temperature; iii) by fitting the magnetoresistances at low temperature. All methods converge to give a disorder amplitude of $(20 pm 10)$ meV. Because of this relatively low disorder, close to the CNP, at low temperature, the sample resistivity does not exhibit the standard value $simeq h/4e^2$ but diverges. Moreover, the magnetoresistance curves have a unique ambipolar behavior, which has been systematically observed for all studied samples. This is a signature of both asymmetry in the density of states and in-plane charge transfer. The microscopic origin of this behavior cannot be unambiguously determined. However, we propose a model in which the SiC substrate steps qualitatively explain the ambipolar behavior.