Coulomb scattering rates of excited states in germanene

Abstract

The excited conduction electrons, conduction holes and valence holes in monolayer germanene exhibit the feature-rich Coulomb decay rates. The dexcitation processes are studied using the Matsubara's screened exchange energy. They might utilize the intraband single-particle excitations (SPEs), the interband SPEs, and three kinds of plasmon modes, depending on the quasiparticle states and the Fermi energies. The low-lying valence holes can decay by the undamped acoustic plasmon, so that they present very fast Coulomb deexcitations, the non-monotonous energy dependence and the anisotropic behavior. However, the low-energy conduction holes and electrons behave as 2D electron gas. The high-energy conduction states and the deep-energy valence ones are similar in the available deexcitation channels and the dependence of decay rate on wave vector k.