Abnormal blueshift of the absorption edge in graphene nanodots

In a conventional semiconductor, when the dielectric screening effect is suppressed, the exciton binding energy increases and the corresponding excitonic transition would exhibit a redshift in the spectrum. In this work, I study the optical properties of hexagonal graphene nanodots by using a configuration interaction approach and reveal that the edge of the absorption spectrum shows an abnormal blueshift as the environmental dielectric constant ϵ_r decreases. The two dominant many-body effects in the nanodot: the quasiparticle and excitonic effects are both found to scale almost linearly with ϵ_r^-1. The former is shown to have a larger proportionality constant and thus accounts for the blueshift of the absorption edge. In contrast to the long-range Coulomb interaction, the on-site Coulomb energy is found to have a negative impact on the bright excitonic states. In the presence of a strong dielectric screening effect, a strong short-range Coulomb interaction is revealed to be responsible for the disintegration of the bright exciton.