(Invited) Unraveling Electron-Phonon Coupling in 2D Materials in Momentum and Time with Ultrafast Electron Diffuse Scattering (UEDS)

• Published in: Meeting abstracts (Electrochemical Society) Vol. MA2023-01; no. 13; p. 1315
• Main Author: Siwick, Bradley John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Electrochemical Society, Inc 28.08.2023
• ISSN: 2151-2043; 2151-2035
• DOI: 10.1149/MA2023-01131315mtgabs

The nature of the couplings within and between lattice and charge degrees of freedom is central to an understanding of electrical and heat transport in materials. These interactions are essential to phenomena as diverse as superconductivity, charge density waves and carrier mobility in semiconductors and metals. Despite their fundamental role, detailed momentum-dependent information on the strength of electron-phonon coupling (EPC) and phonon-phonon coupling (PPC) across the entire Brillouin zone has proved to be very difficult to obtain. I will describe an emerging pump-probe technique, ultrafast electron diffuse scattering (UEDS), that provides such information from the perspective of the phonon system directly. Recent examples of the application of UEDS to layered (2D) materials will be the focus. First, in the thermoelectric material SnSe – a strongly polar semiconductor – we directly observe the phonon dressing processes that yield carrier localization and polaron formation with UEDS. In SnSe these phonon dressing dynamics are profoundly bimodal, with the fast (300 fs) process associated with the formation of a quasi-1D lattice distortion and a relatively large polaron and the slower (4 ps, an order of magnitude slower timescale) process associated with small polaron formation. The observations in SnSe are consistent with electron and hole polarons being different sizes, or the process of polaron formation being instrincially bimodal for both carriers in a manner reminiscent of Lars Onsager’s inverse snowball effect. Second, the extension of UEDS to a MoS 2 monolayer heterostructure will be demonstrated. These results reveal substrate dielectric screening of the electron-phonon interaction within the monolayer as well as the monomentum-dependent carrier-phonon equilibration. These results are compared directly against ab-initio simulations of these processes Figure 1