Graphene sheets encapsulated between hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) slabs display superb electronic properties due to very limited scattering from extrinsic disorder sources such as Coulomb impurities and corrugations. Such samples are therefore expec
ted to be ideal platforms for highly-tunable low-loss plasmonics in a wide spectral range. In this Article we present a theory of collective electron density oscillations in a graphene sheet encapsulated between two hBN semi-infinite slabs (hBN/G/hBN). Graphene plasmons hybridize with hBN optical phonons forming hybrid plasmon-phonon (HPP) modes. We focus on scattering of these modes against graphenes acoustic phonons and hBN optical phonons, two sources of scattering that are expected to play a key role in hBN/G/hBN stacks. We find that at room temperature the scattering against graphenes acoustic phonons is the dominant limiting factor for hBN/G/hBN stacks, yielding theoretical inverse damping ratios of hybrid plasmon-phonon modes of the order of $50$-$60$, with a weak dependence on carrier density and a strong dependence on illumination frequency. We confirm that the plasmon lifetime is not directly correlated with the mobility: in fact, it can be anti-correlated.
The Wiedemann-Franz law, connecting the electronic thermal conductivity to the electrical conductivity of a disordered metal, is generally found to be well satisfied even when electron-electron (e-e) interactions are strong. In ultra-clean conductors
, however, large deviations from the standard form of the law are expected, due to the fact that e-e interactions affect the two conductivities in radically different ways. Thus, the standard Wiedemann-Franz ratio between the thermal and the electric conductivity is reduced by a factor $1+tau/tau_{rm th}^{rm ee}$, where $1/tau$ is the momentum relaxation rate, and $1/tau_{rm th}^{rm ee}$ is the relaxation time of the thermal current due to e-e collisions. Here we study the density and temperature dependence of $1/tau_{rm th}^{rm ee}$ in the important case of doped, clean single layers of graphene, which exhibit record-high thermal conductivities. We show that at low temperature $1/tau_{rm th}^{rm ee}$ is $8/5$ of the quasiparticle decay rate. We also show that the many-body renormalization of the thermal Drude weight coincides with that of the Fermi velocity.
We calculate the tunneling density-of-states (DOS) of a disorder-free two-dimensional interacting electron system with a massless-Dirac band Hamiltonian. The DOS exhibits two main features: i) linear growth at large energies with a slope that is supp
ressed by quasiparticle velocity enhancement, and ii) a rich structure of plasmaron peaks which appear at negative bias voltages in an n-doped sample and at positive bias voltages in a p-doped sample. We predict that the DOS at the Dirac point is non-zero even in the absence of disorder because of electron-electron interactions, and that it is then accurately proportional to the Fermi energy. The finite background DOS observed at the Dirac point of graphene sheets and topological insulator surfaces can therefore be an interaction effect rather than a disorder effect.
