2008/03/06 by J. Gonzalez, J. González, Enrico Perfetto +1
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Graphene research and applications #Thermal properties of materials #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.101.176802
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 176802 (2008) · 5 pages, 1 figure
arxiv created 2008/03/06 · openalex publication_date 2008/10/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We address the question of how large can the lifetime of electronic states be at low energies in graphene, below the scale of the optical phonon modes. For this purpose, we study the many-body effects at the K point of the spectrum, which induce a strong coupling between electron-hole pairs and out-of-plane phonons. We show the existence of a soft branch of hybrid states below the electron-hole continuum when graphene is close to the charge neutrality point, leading to an inverse lifetime proportional to the cube of the quasiparticle energy. This implies that a crossover should be observed in transport properties, from such a slow decay rate to the lower bound given at very low energies by the decay into acoustic phonons.