Interplay of intra- and interband absorption in a disordered graphene

The absorption of heavily doped graphene in the terahertz and midinfrared spectral regions is considered, taking into account both the elastic scattering due to finite-range disorder and the variations of concentration due to long-range disorder. The interplay between intra- and interband transitions is analyzed for the high-frequency regime of response, near the Pauli blocking threshold. The gate voltage and temperature dependencies of the absorption efficiency are calculated. It is demonstrated that for typical parameters, the smearing of the interband absorption edge is determined by a partly screened contribution to long-range disorder while the intraband absorption is determined by finite-range scattering. The latter yields the spectral dependencies which deviate from those following from the Drude formula. The obtained dependencies are in agreement with recent experimental results. The comparison of the results of our calculations with the experimental data provides a possibility to extract the disorder characteristics. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.86.235424