No Arabic abstract
The relativistic nature of Dirac electrons and holes in graphene profoundly affects the way they interact with impurities. Signatures of the relativistic behavior have been observed recently in scanning tunneling measurements on individual impurities, but the conductance measurements in this regime are typically dominated by electron and hole puddles. Here we present measurements of quantum interference noise and magnetoresistance in graphene pn junctions. Unlike the conductance, the quantum interference noise can provide access to the scattering at the Dirac point:it is sensitive to the motion of a single impurity, it depends strongly on the fundamental symmetries that describe the system and it is determined by the phase-coherent phenomena which are not necessarily obscured by the puddles. The temperature and the carrier density dependence of resistance fluctuations and magnetoresistance in graphene p-n junctions at low temperatures suggest that the noise is dominated by the quantum interference due to scattering on impurities and that the noise minimum could be used to determine the point where the average carrier density is zero. At larger carrier densities, the amplitude of the noise depends strongly on the sign of the impurity charge, reflecting the fact that the electrons and the holes are scattered by the impurity potential in an asymmetric manner.
We demonstrate the interaction between surface acoustic waves and Dirac electrons in monolayer graphene at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. A metallic interdigitated transducer launches surface waves that propagate through a conventional piezoelectric GaAs substrate and couple to large-scale monolayer CVD graphene films resting on its surface. Based on the induced acousto-electric current, we characterize the frequency domains of the transducer from its first to the third harmonic. We find an oscillatory attenuation of the SAW velocity depending on the conductivity of the graphene layer. The acousto-electric current reveals additional fine structure that is absent in pure magnetotransport. In addition we find a shift between the acousto-electric longitudinal voltage and the velocity change of the SAW. We attribute this shift to the periodic strain field from the propagating SAW that slightly modifies the Dirac cone.
We have studied quantum interference between electrons and holes in a split-ring gold interferometer with graphene arms, one of which contained a pn junction. The carrier type, the pn junction and the phase of the oscillations in a magnetic field were controlled by a top gate placed over one of the arms. We observe clear Aharonov-Bohm oscillations at the Dirac point and away from it, regardless of the carrier type in each arm. We also find clear oscillations when one arm of the interferometer contains a single pn junction, allowing us to study the interplay of Aharonov-Bohm effect and Klein tunneling.
We investigate the polarization dependence of the carrier excitation and relaxation in epitaxial multilayer graphene. Degenerate pump-probe experiments with a temporal resolution of 30 fs are performed for different rotation angles of the pump-pulse polarization with respect to the polarization of the probe pulse. A pronounced dependence of the pump-induced transmission on this angle is found. It reflects a strong anisotropy of the pump-induced occupation of photogenerated carriers in momentum space even though the band structure is isotropic. Within 150 fs after excitation an isotropic carrier distribution is established. Our observations imply the predominant role of collinear scattering preserving the initially optically generated anisotropy in the carrier distribution. The experiments are well described by microscopic time-, momentum, and angle-resolved modelling, which allows us to unambiguously identify non-collinear carrier-phonon scattering to be the main relaxation mechanism giving rise to an isotropic distribution in the first hundred fs after optical excitation.
We have investigated a new feature of impurity cyclotron resonances common to various localized potentials of graphene. A localized potential can interact with a magnetic field in an unexpected way in graphene. It can lead to formation of anomalous boundstates that have a sharp peak with a width $R$ in the probability density inside the potential and a broad peak of size magnetic length $ell$ outside the potential. We investigate optical matrix elements of anomalous states, and find that they are unusually small and depend sensitively on magnetic field. The effect of many-body interactions on their optical conductivity is investigated using a self-consistent time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach (TDHFA). For a completely filled Landau level we find that an excited electron-hole pair, originating from the optical transition between two anomalous impurity states, is nearly uncorrelated with other electron-hole pairs, although it displays a substantial exchange self-energy effects. This absence of correlation is a consequence of a small vertex correction in comparison to the difference between renormalized transition energies computed within the one electron-hole pair approximation. However, an excited electron-hole pair originating from the optical transition between a normal and an anomalous impurity states can be substantially correlated with other electron-hole states with a significant optical strength.
We study electron scattering from a closed magnetic structure embedded in the top surface of a topological insulator (TI). Outside the structure there is a uniform layer of ferromagnetic insulator (FMI), leading to a positive effective mass for the Dirac electrons. The mass inside can be engineered to be negative, leading to a skyrmion structure. The geometric shape of the structure can be circular or deformed, leading to integrable or chaotic dynamics, respectively, in the classical limit. For a circular structure, the relativistic quantum scattering characteristics can be calculated analytically. For a deformed structure, we develop an efficient numerical method, the multiple multipole method, to solve the scattering wavefunctions. We find that anomalous Hall effect as characterized by strong skew scattering can arise, which is robust against structural deformation due to the resonant modes. In the short (long) wavelength regime, the resonant modes manifest themselves as confined vortices (excited edge states). The origin of the resonant states is the spin phase factor of massive Dirac electrons at the skyrmion boundary. Further, in the short wavelength regime, for a circular skyrmion, a large number of angular momentum channels contribute to the resonant modes. In this regime, in principle, classical dynamics are relevant, but we find that geometric deformations, even those as severe as leading to fully developed chaos, have little effect on the resonant modes. The vortex structure of the resonant states makes it possible to electrically ``charge the skyrmion, rendering feasible to manipulate its motion electrically. In the long wavelength regime, only the lowest angular momentum channels contribute to the resonant modes, making the skew scattering sharply directional. These phenomena may find applications for information storage and in Hall devices based on dynamic skyrmion.