Strong Auger scattering in Landau-quantized graphene investigated by infrared pump-probe experiments

The non-equidistant Landau-level (LL) spectrum of graphene enables the investigation of the carrier dynamics of distinct LL transitions. We present pump-probe measurements on multilayer epitaxial graphene, complemented by microscopic modelling. The free-electron laser (FEL) FELBE served as radiation source at a wavelength of 16.5 µm, which corresponds to a photon energy of 75 meV. At a magnetic field of 4.2 T, the photon energy gets resonant with the energetically degenerate LL transitions LL-1 → LL0 and LL0 → LL1. Circularly polarized radiation allows one to address one of these transitions selectively.
Besides a strong increase of the pump-probe signal at 4.2 T, we observe a complex set of pump-probe signals for all four combinations of pump and probe polarization. For contrarily polarized pump and probe radiation, one would expect negative pump-probe signals, as the initial state of the probed transition is populated (pump: σ+; probe: σ-) or the final state of the probe gets depopulated.
Our measurements show the counterintuitive result of positive pump-probe signals for the case of σ+-polarized pump radiation. The experimental findings are well described by microscopic calculations based on the density matrix formalism, which helped to reveal the origin of this behavior.