Bosonization approach for "atomic collapse" in graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum vacuum behavior around charged impurities in graphene, using bosonization to understand atomic collapse phenomena that are difficult to analyze with traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative bosonization approach to study the vacuum structure and multi-body effects in graphene with Coulomb impurities.

Findings

Observation of atomic collapse resonances in graphene.

Development of a bosonization-based model for impurity-induced vacuum collapse.

Insights into multi-body interactions in 2D Dirac fermion systems.

Abstract

We study quantum electrodynamics with 2+1 dimensional massless Dirac fermion around a Coulomb impurity. Around a large charge with atomic number Z > 137, the QED vacuum is expected to collapse due to the strong Coulombic force. While the relativistic quantum mechanics fails to make reliable predictions for the fate of the vacuum, the heavy ion collision experiment also does not give clear understanding of this system. Recently, the "atomic collapse" resonances were observed on graphene where an artificial nuclei can be made. In this paper, we present our nonperturbative study of the vacuum structure of the quasiparticles in graphene with a charge impurity which contains multi-body effect using bosonization method.