Effects of screening on the optical absorption in graphene and in metallic monolayers

Screening is one of the fundamental concepts in solid-state physics. It has a great impact on the electronic properties of graphene, where huge mobilities were observed in spite of the large concentration of charged impurities. While static screening has successfully explained dc mobilities, screeni...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jablan, Marinko, Buljan, Hrvoje, Soljacic, Marin
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88759
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7184-5831
Description
Summary:Screening is one of the fundamental concepts in solid-state physics. It has a great impact on the electronic properties of graphene, where huge mobilities were observed in spite of the large concentration of charged impurities. While static screening has successfully explained dc mobilities, screening properties can be significantly changed at infrared or optical frequencies. In this paper, we discuss the influence of dynamical screening on the optical absorption of graphene and other two-dimensional electron systems such as metallic monolayers. This research is motivated by recent experimental results that pointed out that graphene plasmon linewidths and optical scattering rates can be much larger than scattering rates determined by dc mobilities. Specifically, we discuss a process in which a photon incident on a graphene plane can excite a plasmon by scattering from an impurity, or a surface optical phonon of the substrate.