Properties of the ground state of electronic excitations in carbon-like nanocones

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum ground-state effects in electronic excitations of carbon-like nanocones, revealing independence from disclination size and boundary conditions, and identifies induced magnetic and pseudomagnetic fluxes.

Contribution

It introduces a continuum model accounting for disclination size and boundary conditions, analyzing their effects on ground-state properties of Dirac materials in nanocones.

Findings

Ground-state effects are independent of disclination size.

Ground-state effects can be independent of boundary condition parameters.

Magnetic and pseudomagnetic fluxes are induced in the ground state.

Abstract

On the basis of the continuum model for long-wavelength charge carriers, originating in the tight-binding approximation for the nearest-neighbour interaction of atoms in the crystalline lattice, we consider quantum ground-state effects of electronic excitations in Dirac materials with two-dimensional monolayer honeycomb structures warped into nanocones by a disclination; the nonzero size of the disclination is taken into account, and a boundary condition at the edge of the disclination is chosen to ensure self-adjointness of the Dirac-Weyl Hamiltonian operator. We show that the quantum ground-state effects are independent of the disclination size and find circumstances when they are independent of a parameter of the boundary condition. The magnetic flux circulating in the angular direction around the nanocone apex and the pseudomagnetic flux directed orthogonally to the nanocone surface are shown to be induced in the ground state.