Non-Monotonic Temperature Dependence of Coulomb Drag Peaks in Graphene

Coulomb drag is a direct measurement of the electron-electron interactions between two electronic layers. Graphene is a versatile electronic material with a high-degree of tunability opening up regimes that were not previously accessible. All previous theoretical studies of graphene Coulomb drag away from charge neutrality assume a spatially homogeneous carrier density which gives a peak in the Coulomb drag that decreases with temperature in contradiction to available experimental results. In this work, we develop an effective medium theory for Coulomb drag and show that including spatial inhomogeneity in the carrier density gives rise to a non-monotonic temperature dependence of the drag peaks that is in quantitative agreement with experimental data. Our results also show that at double-charge neutrality, there is a large negative momentum drag for correlated density fluctuations that competes with energy drag and is also non-monotonic with temperature. In addition, we show that when the density fluctuations in the two layers are correlated, the disordered theory has less symmetry than the homogeneous case, giving rise to a violation of Onsager reciprocity between the active and passive layers.