No Arabic abstract
We study the role of long-range electron-electron interactions in a system of two-dimensional anisotropic Dirac fermions, which naturally appear in uniaxially strained graphene, graphene in external potentials, some strongly anisotropic topological insulators, and engineered anisotropic graphene structures. We find that while for small interactions and anisotropy the system restores the conventional isotropic Dirac liquid behavior, strong enough anisotropy can lead to the formation of a quasi-one dimensional electronic phase with dominant charge order (anisotropic excitonic insulator).
We present a formalism to calculate the orbital magnetization of interacting Dirac fermions under a magnetic field. In this approach, the divergence difficulty is overcome with a special limit of the derivative of the thermodynamic potential with respect to the magnetic field. The formalism satisfies the particle-hole symmetry of the Dirac fermions system. We apply the formalism to the interacting Dirac fermions in graphene. The charge and spin orderings and the exchange interactions between all the Landau levels are taken into account by the mean-field theory. The results for the orbital magnetization of interacting Dirac fermions are compared with that of non-interacting cases.
We revisit the effect of local interactions on the quadratic band touching (QBT) of Bernal stacked bilayer graphene models using renormalization group (RG) arguments and quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the Hubbard model. We present an RG argument which predicts, contrary to previous studies, that weak interactions do not flow to strong coupling even if the free dispersion has a QBT. Instead they generate a linear term in the dispersion, which causes the interactions to flow back to weak coupling. Consistent with this RG scenario, in unbiased quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the Hubbard model we find compelling evidence that antiferromagnetism turns on at a finite $U/t$, despite the $U=0$ hopping problem having a QBT. The onset of antiferromagnetism takes place at a continuous transition which is consistent with a dynamical critical exponent $z=1$ as expected for 2+1 d Gross-Neveu criticality. We conclude that generically in models of bilayer graphene, even if the free dispersion has a QBT, small local interactions generate a Dirac phase with no symmetry breaking and that there is a finite-coupling transition out of this phase to a symmetry-broken state.
Recent experiments reveal a significant increase in the graphene Fermi velocity close to charge neutrality. This has widely been interpreted as a confirmation of the logarithmic divergence of the graphene Fermi velocity predicted by a perturbative approach. In this work, we reconsider this problem using functional bosonization techniques calculating the effects of electron interactions on the density of states non-perturbatively. We find that the renormalized velocity is {it finite} and independent of the high energy cut-off, and we argue that the experimental observations are better understood in terms of an anomalous dimension. Our results also represent a bosonized solution for interacting Weyl fermions in (2+1) dimensions at half-filing.
Graphene nanoribbons are widely regarded as promising building blocks for next-generation carbon-based devices. A critical issue to their prospective applications is whether and to what degree their electronic structure can be externally controlled. Here, we combine simple model Hamiltonians with extensive first-principles calculations to investigate the response of armchair graphene nanoribbons to transverse electric fields. Such fields can be achieved either upon laterally gating the nanoribbon or incorporating ambipolar chemical co-dopants along the edges. We reveal that the field induces a semiconductor-to-semimetal transition, with the semimetallic phase featuring zero-energy Dirac fermions that propagate along the armchair edges. The transition occurs at critical fields that scale inversely with the width of the nanoribbons. These findings are universal to group-IV honeycomb lattices, including silicene and germanene nanoribbons, irrespective of the type of edge termination. Overall, our results create new opportunities to electrically engineer Dirac fermions in otherwise semiconducting graphene-like nanoribbons.
The quantum Hall effect in curved space has been the subject of many theoretical investigations in the past, but devising a physical system to observe this effect is hard. Many works have indicated that electronic excitations in strained graphene realize Dirac fermions in curved space in the presence of a background pseudo-gauge field, providing an ideal playground for this. However, the absence of a direct matching between a numerical, strained tight-binding calculation of an observable and the corresponding curved space prediction has hindered realistic predictions. In this work, we provide this matching by deriving the low-energy Hamiltonian from the tight-binding model analytically to second order in the strain and mapping it to the curved-space Dirac equation. Using a strain profile that produces a constant pseudo-magnetic field and a constant curvature, we compute the Landau level spectrum with real-space numerical tight-binding calculations and find excellent agreement with the prediction of the quantum Hall effect in curved space. We conclude discussing experimental schemes for measuring this effect.