2016/04/30 by David N. Carvalho, Carvalho, David N., Andrea Marini +3
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphene research and applications #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Optics (physics.optics) #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.00166
arxiv created 2016/04/30 · openalex publication_date 2016/04/30 · arxiv updated 2016/05/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We discover an unusual phenomenon that occurs when a graphene monolayer is illuminated by a short and intense pulse at normal incidence. Due to the pulse-induced oscillations of the Dirac cones, a dynamical breaking of the layer's centrosymmetry takes place, leading to the generation of second harmonic waves. We prove that this result can only be found by using the full Dirac equation and show that the widely used semiconductor Bloch equations fail to reproduce this and some other important physics of graphene. Our results open new windows in the understanding of nonlinear light-matter interactions in a wide variety of new 2D materials with a gapped or ungapped Dirac-like dispersion.