Evidence for interlayer electronic coupling in multilayer epitaxial graphene from polarization-dependent coherently controlled photocurrent generation

Abstract

Most experimental studies to date of multilayer epitaxial graphene on C-face SiC have indicated that the electronic states of different layers are decoupled as a consequence of rotational stacking. We have measured the third-order nonlinear tensor in epitaxial graphene as a novel approach to probe interlayer electronic coupling, by studying THz emission from coherently controlled photocurrents as a function of the optical pump and THz beam polarizations. We find that the polarization dependence of the coherently controlled THz emission expected from perfectly uncoupled layers, i.e. a single graphene sheet, is not observed. We hypothesize that the observed angular dependence arises from weak coupling between the layers; a model calculation, treating the interlayer coupling as bilayer coupling with variable strength, qualitatively reproduces the polarization angular dependence, providing evidence for coupling.