Comparative study of plasmons in half-filled graphene via Quantum Monte Carlo and Random Phase Approximation

TL;DR

This study compares Quantum Monte Carlo and RPA methods to analyze plasmons in half-filled graphene, revealing the importance of strong interactions and finite Brillouin zone effects on plasmon behavior and transport properties.

Contribution

It provides the first unbiased QMC analysis of graphene plasmons, highlighting the limitations of RPA and the significance of strong interactions and finite zone effects.

Findings

QMC confirms well-defined plasmon peaks near the $a0$ point.

Plasmon dispersion and quasiparticle residue depend on momentum.

Strong interactions significantly modify plasmon properties compared to RPA.

Abstract

Transport properties of strongly correlated materials have contributions from quasiparticle excitations such as electrons and holes as well as emerging collective excitations such as sounds and plasmons which are sustained by interactions. It was previously shown in [Phys. Rev. B 106, 205127] that thermal excitation of the long-lived plasmons in graphene provides a substantial contribution to heat and momentum transport in the interaction-dominated regime. Detailed information on these excitations is therefore necessary for the understanding of hydrodynamic transport with quantitative precision. On the other hand, dynamics of graphene plasmons is usually studied using the perturbation theory within the Dirac-cone approximation, thus neglecting the effects of a finite Brillouin zone and higher-order perturbative corrections. Both these effects can be however significant for strong-interacting systems including free-standing graphene where the effective coupling constant can reach values up to two. Therefore, in this paper, we studied the behavior of plasmons in half-filled free standing graphene using unbiased Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations. We confirm the existence of well-defined resonance peaks for plasmons around the $\Gamma$ point, report their dispersion and the dependence of their quasiparticle residue on momentum. Comparison with the Random-phase-approximation (RPA) calculation for the Dirac theory shows that strong interactions and finite Brillouin zone effects, automatically taken into account in QMC calculations substantially alter the results. Our findings highlight the need to account for these effects analytically when developing theories of electronic transport in free-standing graphene.