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Updated: May 8, 2026

Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Monte Carlo study of the semimetal-insulator phase transition in monolayer graphene with a realistic interelectron
M V Ulybyshev1, P V Buividovich, M I Katsnelson
1ITEP, B Cheremushkinskaya street 25, Moscow 117218, Russia and Institute for Theoretical Problems of Microphysics, Moscow State University, Moscow 119899, Russia.
Abstract:
We report on the results of the first-principles numerical study of spontaneous breaking of chiral (sublattice) symmetry in suspended monolayer graphene due to electrostatic interaction, which takes into account the screening of Coulomb potential by electrons on σ orbitals. In contrast to the results of previous numerical simulations with unscreened potential, we find that suspended graphene is in the conducting phase with unbroken chiral symmetry. This finding is in agreement with recent experimental results by the Manchester group [D. C. Elias et al., Nat. Phys. 7, 701 (2011); A. S. Mayorov et al., Nano Lett. 12, 4629 (2012)]. Further, by artificially increasing the interaction strength, we demonstrate that suspended graphene is quite close to the phase transition associated with spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, which suggests that fluctuations of chirality and nonperturbative effects might still be quite important.
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