No Arabic abstract
We review the problem of electron-electron interactions in graphene. Starting from the screening of long range interactions in these systems, we discuss the existence of an emerging Dirac liquid of Lorentz invariant quasi-particles in the weak coupling regime, and strongly correlated electronic states in the strong coupling regime. We also analyze the analogy and connections between the many-body problem and the Coulomb impurity problem. The problem of the magnetic instability and Kondo effect of impurities and/or adatoms in graphene is also discussed in analogy with classical models of many-body effects in ordinary metals. We show that Lorentz invariance plays a fundamental role and leads to effects that span the whole spectrum, from the ultraviolet to the infrared. The effect of an emerging Lorentz invariance is also discussed in the context of finite size and edge effects as well as mesoscopic physics. We also briefly discuss the effects of strong magnetic fields in single layers and review some of the main aspects of the many-body problem in graphene bilayers. In addition to reviewing the fully understood aspects of the many-body problem in graphene, we show that a plethora of interesting issues remain open, both theoretically and experimentally, and that the field of graphene research is still exciting and vibrant.
We use first-principles Quantum Monte-Carlo simulations to study the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction between hydrogen adatoms attached to a graphene sheet. We find that the pairwise RKKY interactions at distances of a few lattice spacings are strongly affected by inter-electron interactions, in particular, the potential barrier between widely separated adatoms and the dimer configuration becomes wider and thus harder to penetrate. We also point out that anti-ferrromagnetic and charge density wave orderings have very different effects on the RKKY interaction. Finally, we analyze the stability of several regular adatom superlattices with respect to small displacements of a single adatom, distinguishing the cases of adatoms which populate either both or only one sublattice of the graphene lattice.
The effect of electron-electron interaction on the low-temperature conductivity of graphene is investigated experimentally. Unlike in other two-dimensional systems, the electron-electron interaction correction in graphene is sensitive to the details of disorder. A new temperature regime of the interaction correction is observed where quantum interference is suppressed by intra-valley scattering. We determine the value of the interaction parameter, F_0 ~ -0.1, and show that its small value is due to the chiral nature of interacting electrons.
We study the transport through a molecular junction exhibiting interference effects. We show that these effects can still be observed in the presence of molecular vibrations if Coulomb repulsion is taken into account. In the Kondo regime, the conductance of the junction can be changed by several orders of magnitude by tuning the levels of the molecule, or displacing a contact between two atoms, from nearly perfect destructive interference to values of the order of 2e 2 /h expected in Kondo systems. We also show that this large conductance change is robust for reasonable temperatures and voltages for symmetric and asymmetric tunnel couplings between the source-drain electrodes and the molecular orbitals. This is relevant for the development of quantum interference effect transistors based on molecular junctions.
We separate localization and interaction effects in epitaxial graphene devices grown on the C-face of a 4H-SiC substrate by analyzing the low temperature conductivities. Weak localization and antilocalization are extracted at low magnetic fields, after elimination of a geometric magnetoresistance and subtraction of the magnetic field dependent Drude conductivity. The electron electron interaction correction is extracted at higher magnetic fields, where localization effects disappear. Both phenomena are weak but sizable and of the same order of magnitude. If compared to graphene on silicon dioxide, electron electron interaction on epitaxial graphene are not significantly reduced by the larger dielectric constant of the SiC substrate.
Moire materials, and in particular twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), exhibit a range of fascinating phenomena, that emerge from the interplay of band topology and interactions. We show that the non-linear second-order photoresponse is an appealing probe of this rich interplay. A dominant part of the photoresponse is the shift-current, which is determined by the geometry of the electronic wavefunctions and carrier properties, and thus becomes strongly modified by electron-electron interactions. We analyze its dependence on the twist angle and doping, and investigate the role of interactions. In the absence of interactions, the response of the system is dictated by two energy scales: the mean energy of direct transitions between the hole and electron flat bands, and the gap between flat and dispersive bands. Including electron-electron interactions, both enhance the response at the non-interacting characteristic frequencies as well as produce new resonances. We attribute these changes to the filling-dependent band renormalization in TBG. Our results highlight the connection between non-trivial geometric properties of TBG and its optical response, as well as demonstrate how optical probes can access the role of interactions in moire materials.