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.