Ultrafast carrier dynamics in Landau-quantized graphene

Review article, 2015

In an external magnetic field, the energy of massless charge carriers in graphene is quantized into non-equidistant degenerate Landau levels including a zero-energy level. This extraordinary electronic dispersion gives rise to a fundamentally new dynamics of optically excited carriers. Here, we review the state of the art of the relaxation dynamics in Landau-quantized graphene focusing on microscopic insights into possible many-particle relaxation channels.We investigate optical excitation into a non equilibrium distribution followed by ultrafast carrier- carrier and carrier-phonon scattering processes. We reveal that surprisingly the Auger scattering dominates the relaxation dynamics in spite of the non-equidistant Landau quantization in graphene. Furthermore, we demonstrate how technologically relevant carrier multiplication can be achieved and discuss the possibility of optical gain in Landau-quantized graphene. The provided microscopic view on elementary many-particle processes can guide future experimental studies aiming at the design of novel graphene-based optoelectronic devices, such as highly efficient photodetectors, solar cells, and spectrally broad Landau level lasers.