Collective excitations in a large-d model for graphene

Francisco Guinea1, Pierre Le Doussal2, Kay Jörg Wiese2
1 Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (CSIC), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 3, 28049 Madrid, Spain
2 CNRS-Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.

Abstract

We consider a model of Dirac fermions coupled to flexural phonons to describe a graphene sheet fluctuating in dimension 2 + d. We derive the self-consistent screening equations for the quantum problem, exact in the limit of large d. We first treat the membrane alone, and work out the quantum to classical, and harmonic to anharmonic crossover. For the coupled electron-membrane problem we calculate the dressed two-particle propagators of the elastic and electron interactions and find that it exhibits a collective mode which becomes unstable at some wave-vector qc for large enough coupling g. The saddle point analysis, exact at large d, indicates that this instability corresponds to spontaneous and simultaneous appearance of gaussian curvature and electron puddles. The relevance to ripples in graphene is discussed.


arXiv:1312.2854 [pdf]
Phys. Rev. B 89 (2014) 125428 [pdf]


Copyright (C) by Kay Wiese. Last edited April 3, 2014.