Home > Press > Light, sound, action: The plasmonic promise of graphene
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| The new graphene band picture indicates how strongly plasmons couple to the charge carriers in graphene. |
Abstract:
Scientists working at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered striking new details about the electronic structure of graphene, crystalline sheets of carbon just one atom thick. An international team led by Aaron Bostwick and Eli Rotenberg of the ALS found that composite particles called plasmarons play a vital role in determining graphene's properties.
Light, sound, action: The plasmonic promise of graphene
Livermore, CA | Posted on July 7th, 2010"The interesting properties of graphene are all collective phenomena," says Rotenberg, an ALS senior staff scientist responsible for the scientific program at ALS beamline 7, where the work was performed. "Graphene's true electronic structure can't be understood without understanding the many complex interactions of electrons with other particles."
The electric charge carriers in graphene are negative electrons and positive holes, which in turn are affected by plasmons—density oscillations that move like sound waves through the "liquid" of all the electrons in the material. A plasmaron is a composite particle, a charge carrier coupled with a plasmon.
"Although plasmarons were proposed theoretically in the late 1960s, and indirect evidence of them has been found, our work is the first observation of their distinct energy bands in graphene, or indeed in any material," Rotenberg says.
The most striking feature of the recent research is a new band picture for graphene, revealing that the energy bands of graphene cross at three places, not one. The bare-electron picture of graphene shows two conical bands that meet at a single point. But another pair of conical bands, the plasmaron bands, meets at a second, lower Dirac crossing. Between these crossings lies a ring where the hole and plasmaron bands cross.
Understanding the relationships among these three kinds of particles—charge carriers, plasmons, and plasmarons—may hasten the day when graphene can be used for "plasmonics" to build ultrafast computers—perhaps even room-temperature quantum computers—plus a wide range of other tools and applications.
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