Twisted bilayer graphene photoluminescence emission peaks at van Hove singularities.

We report on photoluminescence emission imaging by femtosecond laser excitation on twisted bilayer graphene samples. The emission images are obtained by tuning the excitation laser energies in the near infrared region. We demonstrate an increase of the photoluminescence emission at excitation energies that depends on the bilayer twist angle. The results show a peak for the light emission when the excitation is in resonance with transitions at the van Hove singularities in the electronic density of states. We measured the photoluminescence excitation peak position and width for samples with various twist angles showing resonances in the energy range of 1.2 to 1.7 eV.

Supercollision cooling effects on the hot photoluminescence emission of graphene.

We report on hot photoluminescence measurements that show the effects of acoustic phonon supercollision processes in the intensity of graphene light emission. We use a simple optical method to induce defects on single layer graphene in a controlled manner to study in detail the light emission dependence on the sample defect density. It is now well accepted that the graphene photoluminescence is due to black-body thermal emission from the quasi-equilibrium electrons at a temperature well above the lattice temperature. Our results show that as the sample defect density is increased the electrons relax energy more efficiently via acoustic phonon supercollision processes leading to lower electron temperatures and thus lower emission intensities. The calculated intensity decrease due to supercollision energy relaxation agrees well with the experimental data.

Defect-induced supercollision cooling of photoexcited carriers in graphene.

Defects play a fundamental role in the energy relaxation of hot photoexcited carriers in graphene, thus a complete understanding of these processes are vital for improving the development of graphene devices. Recently, it has been theoretically predicted and experimentally demonstrated that defect-assisted acoustic phonon supercollision, the collision between a carrier and both an acoustic phonon and a defect, is an important energy relaxation process for carriers with excess energy below the optical phonon emission. Here, we studied samples with defects optically generated in a controlled manner to experimentally probe the supercollision model as a function of the defect density. We present pump and probe transient absorption measurements showing that the decay time decreases as the density of defect increases as predicted by the supercollision model.