Magnetic, charge, and transport properties of graphene nanoflakes

TL;DR

This study explores how interactions in graphene nanoflakes influence their magnetic, charge, and transport behaviors, revealing phase stability and conductance relationships using the functional renormalization group method.

Contribution

It provides a detailed phase diagram for graphene nanoflakes considering realistic long-range Coulomb interactions, highlighting the effects of screening on phase stability.

Findings

Realistic Coulomb screening enhances the critical interaction for SDW and CDW phases.

Graphene nanoflakes remain in the semimetal phase under realistic conditions.

The study links conductance properties to magnetic and charge states.

Abstract

We investigate magnetic, charge and transport properties of hexagonal graphene nanoflakes (GNFs) connected to two metallic leads by using the functional renormalization group (fRG) method. The interplay between the on-site and long-range interactions leads to a competition of semimetal (SM), spin density wave (SDW), and charge-density-wave (CDW) phases. The ground-state phase diagrams are presented for the GNF systems with screened realistic long-range electron interaction [T. O. Wehling, et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 236805 (2011)], as well as uniformly screened long-range Coulomb potential $\propto 1/r$. We demonstrate that the realistic screening of Coulomb interaction by $\sigma$ bands causes moderate (strong) enhancement of critical long-range interaction strength, needed for the SDW (CDW) instability, compared to the results for the uniformly screened Coulomb potential. This enhancement gives rise to a wide region of stability of the SM phase for realistic interaction, such that freely suspended GNFs are far from both SM-SDW and SM-CDW phase-transition boundaries and correspond to the SM phase. Close relation between the linear conductance and the magnetic or charge states of the systems is discussed. A comparison of the results with those of other studies on GNFs systems and infinite graphene sheet is presented.