Effect of electron-electron interactions on the conductivity of clean graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-electron interactions affect the conductivity of clean graphene, revealing that the universal minimal conductivity is modified by interactions and exhibits non-trivial frequency dependence.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of interaction effects on graphene's conductivity, highlighting the failure of the RPA and deriving an exact result in the weak interaction limit.

Findings

Electron-electron interactions break the universality of minimal conductivity.

The optical conductivity shows non-trivial frequency dependence due to interactions.

The RPA approximation fails to capture the interaction effects accurately.

Abstract

Minimal conductivity of a single undoped graphene layer is known to be of the order of the conductance quantum, independent of the electron velocity. We show that this universality does not survive electron-electron interaction which results in the non-trivial frequency dependence. We begin with analyzing the perturbation theory in the interaction parameter 'g' for the electron self-energy and observe the failure of the random-phase approximation. The optical conductivity is then derived from the quantum kinetic equation and the exact result is obtained in the limit when g << 1 << g ln\omega.