Electrically Tunable Nonequilibrium Optical Response of Graphene.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35188753.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acsnano.1c04937 and PMC identifier 9098177.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The ability to tune the optical response of a material via electrostatic gating is crucial for optoelectronic applications, such as electro-optic modulators, saturable absorbers, optical limiters, photodetectors, and transparent electrodes. The band structure of single layer graphene (SLG), with zero-gap, linearly dispersive conduction and valence bands, enables an easy control of the Fermi energy, <i>E</i><sub>F</sub>, and of the threshold for interband optical absorption. Here, we report the tunability of the SLG nonequilibrium optical response in the near-infrared (1000-1700 nm/0.729-1.240 eV), exploring a range of <i>E</i><sub>F</sub> from -650 to 250 meV by ionic liquid gating. As <i>E</i><sub>F</sub> increases from the Dirac point to the threshold for Pauli blocking of interband absorption, we observe a slow-down of the photobleaching relaxation dynamics, which we attribute to the quenching of optical phonon emission from photoexcited charge carriers. For <i>E</i><sub>F</sub> exceeding the Pauli blocking threshold, photobleaching eventually turns into photoinduced absorption, because the hot electrons' excitation increases the SLG absorption. The ability to control both recovery time and sign of the nonequilibrium optical response by electrostatic gating makes SLG ideal for tunable saturable absorbers with controlled dynamics.