Temperature dependance of Intrinsic Spin Orbit Coupling Gap in Graphene probed by Terahertz photoconductivity

Graphene is a quantum spin Hall insulator, with a nontrivial topological gap induced by the spin-orbit coupling. Such splitting is weak (similar to 45 mu eV) in the absence of external magnetic field. However, due to rather long spin-relaxation time, graphene is an attractive candidate for applications in quantum technologies. When it is encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride, the coupling between graphene and the substrate compensates intrinsic spin-orbit coupling and decreases the nontrivial topological gap, which may lead to phase transition into a trivial band insulator state. In this work, we have measured experimentally the zero-field splittings in monolayer and bilayer graphene by the means of subterahertz photoconductivity-based electron spin resonance technique. The dependance in temperature of such splittings have been also studied in the 2-12K range. We observed a decrease of the spin splittings with increasing temperature. Such behavior might be understood from several physical mechanisms that could induce a temperature dependence of the spin-orbit coupling. These includes the difference in the expansion coefficients between the graphene and the boron nitride substrate or the metal contacts, the electron-phonon interactions, and the presence of a magnetic order at low temperature.