Magneto-optical conductivity of graphene on polar substrates

Abstract

We theoretically study the effect of polar substrates on the magneto-optical conductivity of doped monolayer graphene, where we particularly focus on the role played by surface polar phonons (SPPs). Our calculations suggest that polaronic shifts of the intra- and interband absorption peaks can be significantly larger for substrates with strong electron-SPP coupling than those in graphene on nonpolar substrates, where only intrinsic graphene optical phonons with much higher energies contribute. Electron-phonon scattering and phonon-assisted transitions are, moreover, found to result in a loss of spectral weight at the absorption peaks. The strength of these processes is strongly temperature dependent and with increasing temperatures the magneto-optical conductivity becomes increasingly affected by polar substrates, most noticeably in polar substrates with small SPP energies such as HfO2. The inclusion of a Landau level-dependent scattering rate to account for Coulomb impurity scattering does not alter this qualitative picture, but can play an important role in determining the line shape of the absorption peaks, especially at low temperatures, where impurity scattering dominates. © 2013 American Physical Society.