Monte-Carlo study of the semimetal-insulator phase transition in monolayer graphene with realistic inter-electron interaction potential

Abstract

We report on the results of the first-principle 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 [6]. Further, by artificially increasing the interaction strength we demonstrate that suspended graphene is quite close to the phase tran- sition associated with spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, which suggests that fluctuations of chirality and nonperturbative effects might still be quite important.