The next-nearest neighbor hopping term t determines a magnitude and, hence, importance of several phenomena in graphene, which include self-doping due to broken bonds and the Klein tunneling that in the presence of t is no longer perfect. Theoretical
estimates for t vary widely whereas a few existing measurements by using polarization resolved magneto-spectroscopy have found surprisingly large t, close or even exceeding highest theoretical values. Here we report dedicated measurements of the density of states in graphene by using high-quality capacitance devices. The density of states exhibits a pronounced electron-hole asymmetry that increases linearly with energy. This behavior yields t approx -0.30 eV +-15%, in agreement with the high end of theory estimates. We discuss the role of electron-electron interactions in determining t and overview phenomena which can be influenced by such a large value of t.
The effect of electronic interactions in graphene with vacancies or resonant scatterers is investigated. We apply dynamical mean-field theory in combination with quantum Monte Carlo simulations, which allow us to treat non-perturbatively quantum fluc
tuations beyond Hartree-Fock approximations. The interactions narrow the width of the resonance and induce a Curie magnetic susceptibility, signaling the formation of local moments. The absence of saturation of the susceptibility at low temperatures suggests that the coupling between the local moment and the conduction electrons is ferromagnetic.
We analyze the Coulomb interacting problem in undoped graphene layers by using an excitonic variational ansatz. By minimizing the energy, we derive a gap equation which reproduces and extends known results. We show that a full treatment of the exchan
ge term, which includes the renormalization of the Fermi velocity, tends to suppress the phase transition by increasing the critical coupling at which the excitonic instability takes place.
Smoothly varying lattice strain in graphene affects the Dirac carriers through a synthetic gauge field. When the lattice strain is time dependent, as in connection with phononic excitations, the gauge field becomes time dependent and the synthetic ve
ctor potential is also associated with an electric field. We show that this synthetic electric field has observable consequences. Joule heating associated with the currents driven by the synthetic electric field dominates the intrinsic damping, caused by the electron-phonon interaction, of many acoustic phonon modes of graphene and metallic carbon nanotubes when including the effects of disorder and Coulomb interactions. Several important consequences follow from the observation that by time-reversal symmetry, the synthetic electric field associated with the vector potential has opposite signs for the two valleys. First, this implies that the synthetic electric field drives charge-neutral valley currents and is therefore unaffected by screening. This frequently makes the effects of the synthetic vector potential more relevant than a competing effect of the scalar deformation potential which has a much larger bare coupling constant. Second, valley currents decay by electron-electron scattering (valley Coulomb drag) which causes interesting temperature dependence of the damping rates. While our theory pertains first and foremost to metallic systems such as doped graphene and metallic carbon nanotubes, the underlying mechanisms should also be relevant for semiconducting carbon nanotubes when they are doped.
