Dynamics of photoexcited carriers in graphene

The nonequilibrium dynamics of carriers and phonons in graphene is investigated by solving the microscopic kinetic equations with the carrier-phonon and carrier-carrier Coulomb scatterings explicitly included. The Fermi distribution of hot carriers is found to be established within 100 fs and the temperatures of electrons in the conduction and valence bands are very close to each other, even when the excitation density and the equilibrium density are comparable, thanks to the strong interband Coulomb scattering. Moreover, the temporal evolutions of the differential transmission obtained from our calculations agree with the experiments by Wang et al. [Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 081917 (2010)] and Hale et al. [Phys. Rev. B 83, 121404 (2011)] very well, with two distinct differential transmission relaxations presented. We show that the fast relaxation is due to the rapid carrier-phonon thermalization and the slow one is mainly because of the slow decay of hot phonons. We also show that the remote-interfacial phonons have significant influence on the relaxation of the differential transmission and can be responsible for the difference of the transmission evolutions in samples with few and many layers. In addition, it is found that the temperatures of the hot phonons in different branches are different and the temperature of hot carriers can be even lower than that of the hottest phonons. Finally, we show that the slow relaxation rate exhibits a mild valley in the excitation-density dependence and is linearly dependent on the probe-photon energy.