Universal conductivity of graphene in the ultrarelativistic regime

Abstract

We calculate the optical (T) conductivity in clean graphene in the ultimate low-energy regime, when retardation effects of the electromagnetic interaction become important and when the full Lorentz symmetry emerges. In contrast to what happens with the short range or with the Coulomb long-range instantaneous interactions, the optical conductivity is now no longer equal to its noninteracting value, but acquires universal corrections in powers of the fine structure constant. The coefficient of the first order correction is computed, and found to be of order one. We also present the result for the conductivity in the large-N limit, with N as the number of Dirac fermions species, to the order 1/N2. © 2013 American Physical Society.