Conductivity of suspended graphene at the Dirac point

TL;DR

This paper investigates the temperature-dependent electrical conductivity of suspended graphene at the Dirac point, emphasizing the roles of flexural phonons, electron-electron interactions, and their combined effects on transport properties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model accounting for both phonon and electron-electron interactions, revealing how they jointly influence conductivity in suspended graphene.

Findings

Conductivity scales as T^(-η) with η ≈ 0.7 due to flexural phonons.

Electron-electron interactions modify scattering and screening effects.

The resulting conductivity depends on two temperature-dependent parameters, G[T] and G_e[T].

Abstract

We study transport properties of clean suspended graphene at the Dirac point. In the absence of the electron-electron interaction, the main contribution to resistivity comes from interaction with flexural (out-of-plane deformation) phonons. We find that the phonon-limited conductivity scales with the temperature as $T^{-\eta}, $ where $\eta$ is the critical exponent (equal to $\approx 0.7$ according to numerical studies) describing renormalization of the flexural phonon correlation functions due to anharmonic coupling with the in-plane phonons. The electron-electron interaction induces an additional scattering mechanism and also affects the electron-phonon scattering by screening the deformation potential. We demonstrate that the combined effect of both interactions results in a conductivity that can be expressed as a dimensionless function of two temperature-dependent dimensionless constants, $G[T]$ and $G_e[T]$ which characterize the strength of electron-phonon and electron-electron interaction, respectively. We also discuss the behavior of conductivity away from the Dirac point as well as the role of the impurity potential and compare our predictions with available experimental data.