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Phys. Rev. B 81, 041401(R) (2010) [4 pages]

Many-body instability of Coulomb interacting bilayer graphene: Renormalization group approach

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Oskar Vafek and Kun Yang
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Department of Physics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA

Received 18 June 2009; revised 21 October 2009; published 4 January 2010

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Low-energy electronic structure of (unbiased and undoped) bilayer graphene consists of two Fermi points with quadratic dispersions if trigonal warping is ignored. We show that short-range (or screened Coulomb) interactions are marginally relevant and use renormalization group to study their effects on low-energy properties of the system. We find that the two quadratic Fermi points spontaneously split into four Dirac points. This results in a nematic state that spontaneously breaks the sixfold lattice rotation symmetry (combined with layer permutation) down to a twofold one, with a finite transition temperature. Critical properties of the transition and effects of trigonal warping are also discussed.

© 2010 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.81.041401
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.81.041401
PACS:
71.10.-w, 71.45.-d

See Also

See Also: Fan Zhang, Hongki Min, Marco Polini, and A. H. MacDonald, Spontaneous inversion symmetry breaking in graphene bilayers, Phys. Rev. B 81, 041402 (2010).