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Published December 15, 2014 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Current amplification and relaxation in Dirac systems

Abstract

Recent experiments provide evidence for photocurrent generation in Dirac systems such as topological-insulator surface states and graphene. Within the simplest picture, the magnitude of the photocurrents is governed by the competition between photoexcitation of particle-hole pairs and current relaxation by scattering. Here, we study the relaxation of photocurrents by electron-electron (e−e) collisions, which should dominate in clean systems. We compute the current relaxation rate as a function of the initial energies of the photoexcited carriers and the Fermi energy. For a positive Fermi energy, we find that collisions of a single excited electron with the Fermi sea can substantially increase the current, while for a single excited hole the current initially decreases. Together these processes partially cancel leading to a relative suppression of the relaxation of the total photocurrent carried by an electron-hole pair. We also analyze the limit of many scattering events and find that while e−e collisions initially reduce the current associated with a single hole, the current eventually reverses sign and becomes as large in magnitude as in the electron case. Thus, for photoexcited electron-hole pairs, the current ultimately relaxes to zero. We discuss schemes which may allow one to probe the nontrivial current amplification physics for individual carriers in experiment.

Additional Information

© 2014 American Physical Society. Received 14 January 2014; revised manuscript received 1 October 2014; published 2 December 2014. We thank J. Eisenstein, Erik Henriksen, Justin Song, Feng Wang, and Andrea Young for discussions and acknowledge financial support through SPP 1666 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and a Helmholtz Virtual Institute "New States of Matter and Their Excitations" (Berlin), as well as DARPA, the IQIM, an NSF institute supported by the Moore Foundation, and the Humboldt Foundation (Pasadena).

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevB.90.245110.pdf

Submitted - 1312.6084v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
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October 26, 2023