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Updated: Jul 19, 2025

High Resolution Phonon-assisted Quasi-resonance Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Published on: June 28, 2016
Phonon-Mediated Quasiparticle Lifetime Renormalizations in Few-Layer Hexagonal Boron Nitride
Håkon I Røst1,2, Simon P Cooil3, Anna Cecilie Åsland2
1Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Allégaten 55, 5007 Bergen, Norway.
Abstract:
Understanding the collective behavior of the quasiparticles in solid-state systems underpins the field of nonvolatile electronics, including the opportunity to control many-body effects for well-desired physical phenomena and their applications. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a wide-energy-bandgap semiconductor, showing immense potential as a platform for low-dimensional device heterostructures. It is an inert dielectric used for gated devices, having a negligible orbital hybridization when placed in contact with other systems. Despite its inertness, we discover a large electron mass enhancement in few-layer hBN affecting the lifetime of the π-band states. We show that the renormalization is phonon-mediated and consistent with both single- and multiple-phonon scattering events. Our findings thus unveil a so-far unknown many-body state in a wide-bandgap insulator, having important implications for devices using hBN as one of their building blocks.
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