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Quasiparticle dynamics in graphene

Nature Physics volume 3, pages 36–40 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

The effectively massless, relativistic behaviour of graphene’s charge carriers—known as Dirac fermions—is a result of its unique electronic structure, characterized by conical valence and conduction bands that meet at a single point in momentum space (at the Dirac crossing energy). The study of many-body interactions amongst the charge carriers in graphene and related systems such as carbon nanotubes, fullerenes and graphite is of interest owing to their contribution to superconductivity and other exotic ground states in these systems. Here we show, using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, that electron–plasmon coupling plays an unusually strong role in renormalizing the bands around the Dirac crossing energy—analogous to mass renormalization by electron–boson coupling in ordinary metals. Our results show that electron–electron, electron–plasmon and electron–phonon coupling must be considered on an equal footing in attempts to understand the dynamics of quasiparticles in graphene and related systems.

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Figure 1: The band structure of graphene.
Figure 2: The band structure of graphene near the Fermi level.
Figure 3: MDC widths of carriers in graphene.
Figure 4: Decay processes in graphene.
Figure 5: Energy diagram of electronic excitations in graphene.

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Acknowledgements

This work and the ALS were supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Sciences. K.H. and T.O. were supported by the Max Planck Society. We are grateful to J. L. McChesney for discussions and assistance with the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Light Source, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Aaron Bostwick, Taisuke Ohta & Eli Rotenberg

  2. Department of Molecular Physics, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Faradayweg 4-6, 14195 Berlin, Germany

    Taisuke Ohta & Karsten Horn

  3. Institut für Physik der Kondensierten Materie, Lehrstuhl für Technische Physik, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erwin-Rommel-Straße 1, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany

    Thomas Seyller

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  1. Aaron Bostwick
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Contributions

T.S. and K.H. prepared the SiC substrates. T.O. optimized the graphene quality with help from A.B.; A.B. and T.O. contributed equally to the graphitization during data runs and ARPES measurements. A.B. carried out theoretical modelling. E.R. carried out numerical analysis of the data. E.R. and A.B. wrote the text with review and input from all other co-authors.

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Correspondence to Eli Rotenberg.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Bostwick, A., Ohta, T., Seyller, T. et al. Quasiparticle dynamics in graphene. Nature Phys 3, 36–40 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys477

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