Electron spin relaxation in graphene on a substrate is investigated from the microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach. All the relevant scatterings, such as the electron-impurity, electronacoustic-phonon, electron-optical-phonon, electron-remote-interfacial-phonon, as well as electronelectron Coulomb scatterings, are explicitly included. Our study concentrates on clean intrinsic graphene, where the spin-orbit coupling from the adatoms can be neglected. We discuss the effect of the electron-electron Coulomb interaction on spin relaxation under various conditions. It is shown that the electron-electron Coulomb scattering plays an important role in spin relaxation at high temperature. We also find a significant increase of the spin relaxation time for high spin polarization even at room temperature, which is due to the Coulomb Hartree-Fock contribution-induced effective longitudinal magnetic field. It is also discovered that the spin relaxation time increases with the inplane electric field due to the hot-electron effect, which is different from the non-monotonic behavior in semiconductors. Moreover, we show that the electron-electron Coulomb scattering in graphene is not strong enough to establish the steady-state hot-electron distribution widely used in the literature and an alternative approximate one is proposed based on our computation.

The nonequilibrium dynamics of carriers and phonons in graphene is investigated by solving the microscopic kinetic equations with the carrier-phonon and carrier-carrier Coulomb scatterings explicitly included. The Fermi distribution of hot carriers are found to be established within 100 fs and the temperatures of electrons in the conduction and valence bands are very close to each other, even when the excitation density and the equilibrium density are comparable, thanks to the strong inter-band Coulomb scattering. Moreover, the temporal evolutions of the differential transmission obtained from our calculations agree with the experiments by Wang et al. [Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 081917 (2010)] and Hale et al. [Phys. Rev. B 83, 121404 (2011)] very well, with two distinct differential transmission relaxations presented. We show that the fast relaxation is due to the rapid carrier-phonon thermalization and the slow one is mainly because of the slow decay of hot phonons. In addition, it is found that the temperatures of the hot phonons in different branches are different and the temperature of hot carriers can be even lower than that of the hottest phonons. Finally, we show that the slow relaxation rate exhibits a mild valley in the excitation density dependence and is linearly dependent on the probe-photon energy.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

We report an anomalous scaling of the D'yakonov-Perel' spin relaxation with the momentum relaxation in semiconductor quantum wells under a strong magnetic field in the Voigt configuration. We focus on the case in which the external magnetic field is perpendicular to the spin-orbit-coupling-induced effective magnetic field and its magnitude is much larger than the latter one. It is found that the longitudinal spin relaxation time is proportional to the momentum relaxation time even in the strong-scattering limit, indicating that the D'yakonovPerel' spin relaxation demonstrates Elliott-Yafet-like behavior. Moreover, the transverse spin relaxation time is proportional (inversely proportional) to the momentum relaxation time in the strong-(weak-) scattering limit, both in the opposite trends against the well-established conventional D'yakonov-Perel' spin relaxation behaviors. We further demonstrate that all the above anomalous scaling relations come from the unique form of the effective inhomogeneous broadening.