Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Coulomb interaction is the main mechanism that transforms a nonequilibrium carrier distribution in graphene into a hot Fermi-Dirac distribution. In many experiments carriers are assumed to be thermalized on a timescale well below 100 fs. However, we have recently observed that the carrier distribution is strongly anisotropic in k-space when graphene is excited with near infrared pulses (photon energy 1.5 eV, duration 30 fs). The anisotropy induced by the polarization of light vanishes on a timescale of 150 fs due to scattering with optical phonons [1]. Exciting with photon energies of 75 meV, i.e. well below the optical phonon energy (~200 meV), strongly quenches the scattering via phonons and allows one to study pure Coulomb scattering in the vicinity of the Dirac point. At low fluences the transition from the anisotropic distribution to an isotropic one is very slow (~5 ps at 10 K) since Coulomb scattering is predominantly collinear and thus preserves the anisotropic distribution. At higher fluences the strength of Coulomb scattering increases, resulting in a faster decay of the anisotropy. In a second experiment we study the relaxation dynamics in Landau quantized graphene [2].
By applying circularly polarized radiation in the pump-probe experiments individual low-index Landau level transitions can be addressed. Here a surprising effect is revealed, namely a change in sign of a pump-probe signal with respect to the expectation considering single-particle interactions only (cf.Fig.1). This is caused by strong Auger scattering that depletes the zeroth Landau level even though it is optically pumped at the same time.

[1] M. Mittendorff. et al. Nano Lett., 14 2014, 1504
[2] M. Mittendorff. et al. Nature Phys., 11 2015, 75