Ultrafast spectroscopic imaging of exfoliated graphene

In this paper we investigate the carrier cooling dynamics in graphene flakes exploiting ultrafast transient absorption imaging technique. This tool enables us to combine nanoscale spatial resolution and sub-picosecond (ps) time resolution. It provides many advantages over the standard transient absorption techniques because it directly investigates the excited state dynamics at a local scale that would be usually averaged out. The local dynamics show a photobleaching recovery in the first ps, assigned to cooling by electron–phonon scattering. We found that the photoexcited carrier dynamics is spatially uniform over the micrometer-sized exfoliated graphene layer. Ultrafast pump–probe technique is combined with an optical microscope to investigate the local excited state dynamics in graphene flakes.