Anisotropy of Quasiparticle Lifetimes and the Role of Disorder for Ultrafast Electron Dynamics in Graphite

Gunnar Moos¹, Cornelius Gahl², Roman Fasel³, Martin Wolf² and Tobias Hertel¹

¹Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Faradayweg 4-6, 14195 Berlin, Germany
²Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Experimentalphysik, Arnimallee 14, 14195 Berlin, Germany
³EMPA Dübendorf, Überlandstr. 129, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland

Femtosecond time-resolved photoemission of photoexcited electrons in highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) provides strong evidence for anisotropies of quasiparticle (QP) lifetimes. Indicative of such anisotropies is a pronounced anomaly in the energy dependence of QP lifetimes between 1.1 eV and 1.5 eV - the vicinity of a saddle point in the graphite bandstructure. This is supported by recent ab initio calculations and a comparison with experiments on defect-enriched HOPG which reveal that disorder, e.g. defects or phonons, increases electron energy relaxation rates.