Screening of charge impurities in graphene is analyzed using the exact solution for vacuum polarization obtained from the massless Dirac-Kepler problem. For the impurity charge below certain critical value no density perturbation is found away from the impurity, in agreement with the linear response theory result. For supercritical charge, however, the polarization distribution is shown to have a power law profile, leading to screening of the excess charge at large distances. The Dirac-Kepler scattering states give rise to standing wave oscillations in the local density of states which appear and become prominent in the supercritical regime.
We study the problem of Coulomb field-induced charging of the ground state in a system of 2D massive Dirac particles (gapped graphene). As in its 3D QED counterpart, the critical Coulomb coupling is renormalized to higher values, compared to the massless case. We find that in gapped graphene a novel supercritical regime is possible, where the screening charge is comparable to the impurity charge, thus leading to suppression of the Coulomb field at nanometer scales. We corroborate this with numerical solution of the tight-binding problem in the honeycomb lattice.
It is shown that a ``vacuum polarization'' induced by Coulomb potential in graphene leads to a strong suppression of electric charges even for undoped case (no charge carriers). A standard linear response theory is therefore not applicable to describe the screening of charge impurities in graphene. In particular, it overestimates essentially the contributions of charge impurities into the resistivity of graphene.
We study the supercritical instability in gapped graphene with two charged impurities separated by distance R using the two-dimensional Dirac equation for electron quasiparticles. Attention is paid to a situation when charges of impurities are subcritical, whereas their total charge exceeds a critical one. The critical distance R_{cr} in the system of two charged centers is defined as that at which the electron bound state with the lowest energy reaches the boundary of the lower continuum. A variational calculation of the critical distance R_{cr} separating the supercritical (R<R_{cr}) and sub…
We study the Dirac equation for quasiparticles in gapped graphene with two oppositely charged impurities by using the technique of linear combination of atomic orbitals and variational Galerkin--Kantorovich method. We show that for sufficiently large charges of impurities the wave function of the occupied electron bound state of the highest energy changes its localization from the negatively charged impurity to the positively charged one as the distance between the impurities increases. This migration of the electron wave function of supercritical electric dipole is a generalization of the fam…
Charged impurities in semiconductor quantum dots comprise one of the main obstacles to achieving scalable fabrication and manipulation of singlet-triplet spin qubits. We theoretically show that using dots that contain several electrons each can help to overcome this problem through the screening of the rough and noisy impurity potential by the excess electrons. We demonstrate how the desired screening properties turn on as the number of electrons is increased, and we characterize the properties of a double quantum dot singlet-triplet qubit for small odd numbers of electrons per dot. We show th…
We calculate exactly the vacuum polarization charge density in the field of a subcritical Coulomb impurity, $Z|e|/r$, in graphene. Our analysis is based on the exact electron Green's function, obtained by using the operator method, and leads to results that are exact in the parameter $Zα$, where $α$ is the "fine structure constant" of graphene. Taking into account also electron-electron interactions in the Hartree approximation, we solve the problem self-consistently in the subcritical regime, where the impurity has an effective charge $Z_{eff}$, determined by the localized induced charge. We …
The effect of supercritical charge impurities in graphene is very similar to the supercritical atomic collapses in QED for Z > 137, but with a much lower critical charge. In this sense graphene can be considered as a natural testing ground for the analysis of quantum field theory vacuum instabilities. We analyze the quantum transition from subcritical to supercritical charge regimes in gapped graphene in a common framework that preserves unitarity for any value of charge impurities. In the supercritical regime it is possible to introduce boundary conditions which control the singular behavior …
We review the theoretical and experimental results connected with the electron states in two-dimensional Dirac systems paying a special attention to the atomic collapse in graphene. Two-electron bound states of a Coulomb impurity are considered too. A rather subtle role of a magnetic field in the supercritical charge problem in graphene is discussed. The electron states in the field of two equally charged impurities are studied and the conditions for supercritical instability to occur are determined. It is shown that the supercriticality of novel type is realized in gapped graphene with two un…
We investigate the low-energy phase excitations of the quasi-one-dimensional charge density wave (CDW) in $\mathrm{K}_{0.3}\mathrm{Mo}\mathrm{O}_3$, by direct probing of infrared-active CDW-lattice modes (phase-phonons) with ultrafast terahertz spectroscopy. Both the nonequilibrium response and temperature dependence of the bands are reconciled by generalizing the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory, beyond that previously applied to the amplitude-phonons, to include impurity effects, while the photoinduced blue-shifts are attributed to a reduction of the electron-phonon coupling induced by …
We report the observation of an isolated charged impurity in graphene and present direct evidence of the close connection between the screening properties of a 2D electron system and the influence of the impurity on its electronic environment. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and Landau level spectroscopy we demonstrate that in the presence of a magnetic field the strength of the impurity can be tuned by controlling the occupation of Landau-level states with a gate-voltage. At low occupation the impurity is screened becoming essentially invisible. Screening diminishes as states are filled u…
It is a common knowledge that an effective interaction of a quantum impurity with an electromagnetic field can be screened by surrounding charge carriers, whether mobile or static. Here we demonstrate that very strong, `anomalous' screening can take place in the presence of a neutral, weakly-polarizable environment, due to an exchange of orbital angular momentum between the impurity and the bath. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to generalize all phenomena related to isolated impurities in an external field to the case when a many-body environment is present, by casting the problem in …
We analyze the transport properties of two artificial magnetic impurities coupled togethervia a tunable RKKY interaction mediated by conduction electrons of a finite size one dimensional wire. We show that the sign of the RKKY interaction can be controlled by gating the wire. We investigate the interplay between finite size effects and RKKY interaction and found that the two artificial impurities start to interact each-other as soon as the Kondo screening cloud length becomes larger that the length of the wire. This should allow to give a lower experimental estimate of the Kondo screening clou…
The ground-state and the transport properties of graphene subject to the potential of in-plane charged impurities are studied. The screening of the impurity potential is shown to be nonlinear, producing a fractal structure of electron and hole puddles. Statistical properties of this density distribution as well as the charge compressibility of the system are calculated in the leading-log approximation. The conductivity depends logarithmically on $α$, the dimensionless strength of the Coulomb interaction. The theory is asymptotically exact when $α$ is small, which is the case for graphene on a …
We theoretically investigate the effect of the non-magnetic and magnetic impurities to the 2D parabolic Dirac system. The induced charge density by the charged impuri- ty is obtained by the linear response theory within the random phase approximation. We also detailly calculate the RKKY interaction between two magnetic impurities placed within the 2D sheet of the Dirac materials with isotropic and anisotropic dis- persion. For the anisotropic dispersion, the RKKY interaction is also anisotropic and related to the lattice parameters which can be obtained throuh the DFT calculation or the experi…
Distributions of charge near charged impurities in Weyl semimetals are considered with the help of relativistic Thomas-Fermi method in full analogy with the solutions previously found in QED. Screening and anti-screening, zero charge and asymptotic freedom solutions appearing in different physical situations are discussed.
A theory is developed for the density and temperature dependent carrier conductivity in doped three-dimensional (3D) Dirac materials focusing on resistive scattering from screened Coulomb disorder due to random charged impurities (e.g., dopant ions and unintentional background impurities). The theory applies both in the undoped intrinsic ("high-temperature", $T \gg T_F$) and the doped extrinsic ("low-temperature", $T \ll T_F$) limit with analytical scaling properties for the carrier conductivity obtained in both regimes, where $T_F$ is the Fermi temperature corresponding to the doped free carr…
We show that the changes in the electronic density of states (DOS) in graphene induced by impurity scattering with short-range potentials are completely different from those caused by the long-range Coulomb potential. The spectral weight of the state that eventually disappears into the valence band (as the strength of scattering increases) does not transform into a resonance state. Therefore no unusual screening effects related to a redistribution of the density of states in the valence band are observed. The states induced by the short-range impurities in graphene, therefore, have distinctive…
We study massless Dirac fermions in a supercritical Coulomb potential with the emphasis on that its low-energy physics is universal and parametrized by a single quantity per supercritical angular momentum channel. This low-energy parameter with the dimension of length is defined only up to multiplicative factors and thus each supercritical channel exhibits the discrete scale invariance. In particular, we show that the induced vacuum polarization has a power-law tail whose coefficient is a sum of log-periodic functions with respect to the distance from the potential center. This coefficient can…
We study the problem of the electron excitation spectrum in the presence of point-like and regularized Coulomb impurities in gapped graphene. To this end, we use the Dirac model and in the point-like case theory of self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators. In the point-like case, we construct a family of self-adjoint Hamiltonians describing the excitations for any charge of an impurity. Spectra and (generalized) eigenfunctions for all such Hamiltonians are found. Then, we consider the spectral problem in the case of a regularized Coulomb potential of impurities for a special regularizati…
We show that by combining high-k dielectric substrate and high density of charge carriers, Coulomb impurity can be effectively screened, leading to an unprecedented room-temperature mobility of ~150cm2/Vs in monolayer MoS2. The high sample quality enables us to quantitatively extract the mobility components limited by Coulomb impurities, intrinsic and surface optical phonons, and study their scaling with temperature, carrier density and dielectric constant. The excellent agreement between our theoretical analysis and experimental data demonstrates unambiguously that room-temperature phonon-lim…
We develop a field-theoretic approach to massless Dirac fermions in a supercritical Coulomb potential. By introducing an Aharonov--Bohm solenoid at the potential center, the critical Coulomb charge can be made arbitrarily small for one partial-wave sector, where a perturbative renormalization group analysis becomes possible. We show that a scattering amplitude for reflection of particle at the potential center exhibits the renormalization group limit cycle, i.e., log-periodic revolutions as a function of the scattering energy, revealing the emergence of discrete scale invariance. This outcome …
Resonant scatterers such as hydrogen adatoms can strongly enhance the low energy density of states in graphene. Here, we study the impact of these impurities on the electronic screening. We find a two-faced behavior: Kubo formula calculations reveal an increased dielectric function $\varepsilon$ upon creation of midgap states but no metallic divergence of the static $\varepsilon$ at small momentum transfer $q\to 0$. This bad metal behavior manifests also in the dynamic polarization function and can be directly measured by means of electron energy loss spectroscopy. A new length scale $l_c$ bey…
We obtain a novel bound state spectrum of the low energy excitations near the Fermi points of graphene in the presence of a charge impurity. The effects of possible short range interactions induced by the impurity are modelled by suitable boundary conditions. The spectrum in the subcritical region of the effective Coulomb coupling is labelled by a parameter which characterizes the boundary conditions and determines the inequivalent quantizations of the system. In the supercritical region we obtain a renormalization group flow for the effective Coulomb coupling.
In the three-dimensional topological insulator (TI), the physics of doped semiconductors exists literally side-by-side with the physics of ultra-relativistic Dirac fermions. This unusual pairing creates a novel playground for studying the interplay between disorder and electronic transport. In this mini-review we focus on the disorder caused by the three-dimensionally distributed charged impurities that are ubiquitous in TIs, and we outline the effects it has on both the bulk and surface transport in TIs. We present self-consistent theories for Coulomb screening both in the bulk and at the sur…
We have measured the phase decoherence rate, $τ_ϕ^{-1}$ of conduction electrons in disordered Ag wires implanted with 2 and 10 parts per million Fe impurities, by means of the weak localization magnetoresistance. The Kondo temperature of Fe in Ag, $T_K \approx 4$ K, is in the ideal temperature range to study the progressive screening of the Fe spins as the temperature $T$ falls below $T_K$. The contribution to $τ_ϕ^{-1}$ from the Fe impurities is clearly visible over the temperature range 40 mK -- 10 K. Below $T_K$, $τ_ϕ^{-1}$ falls rapidly until $T/T_K \approx 0.1$, in agreement with recent t…
We calculate the dynamic polarizability under the random phase approximation for the dice lattice. This two-dimensional system gives rise to massless Dirac fermions with pseudospin-1 in the low-energy quantum excitation spectrum, providing a Dirac-cone plus flat-band dispersion. Due to the presence of the flat band, the polarizability shows key differences to that of graphene (the pseudospin-1/2 Dirac material). We find that the plasmon branch is pinched in to a single point, $ω_p=q=μ$, independent of the background dielectric constant. Finally, screening effects are discussed with regard to i…
We derive a kinetic theory capable of dealing both with large spin-orbit coupling and Kondo screening in dilute magnetic alloys. We obtain the collision integral non-perturbatively and uncover a contribution proportional to the momentum derivative of the impurity scattering S-matrix. The latter yields an important correction to the spin diffusion and spin-charge conversion coefficients, and fully captures the so-called side-jump process without resorting to the Born approximation (which fails for resonant scattering), or to otherwise heuristic derivations. We apply our kinetic theory to a quan…
We review the physics of charged impurities in the vicinity of graphene. The long-range nature of Coulomb impurities affects both the nature of the ground state density profile as well as graphene's transport properties. We discuss the screening of a single Coulomb impurity and the ensemble averaged density profile of graphene in the presence of many randomly distributed impurities. Finally, we discuss graphene's transport properties due to scattering off charged impurities both at low and high carrier density.
Charge impurities in graphene can host an infinite family of Rydberg-like resonance states of massless Dirac particles. These states, appearing for supercritical charge, are described by Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization of collapsing classical trajectories that descend on point charge, in analogy to Rydberg states relation with planetary orbits. We argue that divalent and trivalent charge impurities in graphene is an ideal system for realization of this atomic collapse regime. Strong coupling of these states to the Dirac continuum via Klein tunneling leads to striking resonance effects with direct…
Screening is one of the fundamental concepts in solid state physics. It has a great impact on the electronic properties of graphene where huge mobilities were observed in spite of the large concentration of charged impurities. While static screening has successfully explained DC mobilities, screening properties can be significantly changed at infrared or optical frequencies. In this paper we discuss the influence of dynamical screening on the optical absorption of graphene and other 2D electron systems like metallic monolayers. This research is motivated by recent experimental results which po…
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are increasingly being used as active components in nanoscale devices. Many interesting properties of 2D materials stem from the reduced and highly non-local electronic screening in two dimensions. While electronic screening within 2D materials has been studied extensively, the question still remains of how 2D substrates screen charge perturbations or electronic excitations adjacent to them. Thickness-dependent dielectric screening properties have recently been studied using electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) experiments. However, it was suggested that some of …
In a recent paper (Phys. Rev. B {\bf 78}, 075316 (2008)), Sajeev and Moiseyev demonstrated that the bound-to-resonant transitions and lifetimes of autoionizing states in spherical quantum dots can be controlled by varying the confinment strength. In the present paper, we report that such control can in some cases be compromised by the presence of Coulomb impurities. It is demonstrated that a screened Coulomb impurity placed in the vicinity of the dot center can lead to bound-to-resonant transitions and to avoided crossings-like behavior when the screening of the impurity charge is varied. It i…
The effect of charge-carrier screening on the transport properties of a neutral graphene sheet is studied by directly probing its electronic structure. We find that the Fermi velocity, Dirac point velocity, and overall distortion of the Dirac cone are renormalized due to the screening of the electron-electron interaction in an unusual way. We also observe an increase of the electron mean free path due to the screening of charged impurities. These observations help us to understand the basis for the transport properties of graphene, as well as the fundamental physics of these interesting electr…
We analyze the screening of an external Coulomb charge in gapless graphene cone, which is taken as a prototype of a topological defect. In the subcritical regime, the induced charge is calculated using both the Green's function and the Friedel sum rule. The dependence of the polarization charge on the Coulomb strength obtained from the Green's function clearly shows the effect of the conical defect and indicates that the critical charge itself depends on the sample topology. Similar analysis using the Friedel sum rule indicates that the two results agree for low values of the Coulomb charge bu…
We analyze the effect of screening provided by the additional graphene layer in double layer graphene heterostructures (DLGs) on transport characteristics of DLG devices in the metallic regime. The effect of gate-tunable charge density in the additional layer is two-fold: it provides screening of the long-range potential of charged defects in the system, and screens out Coulomb interactions between charge carriers. We find that the efficiency of defect charge screening is strongly dependent on the concentration and location of defects within the DLG. In particular, only a moderate suppression …
Combining ab initio calculations and effective models derived from them, we discuss the electronic structure of oxygen doped gold chains when one Au atom is replaced by any transition-metal atom of the $3d$ series. The effect of O doping is to bring extended Au $5d_{xz}$ and $5d_{yz}$ states to the Fermi level, which together with the Au states of zero angular momentum projection, lead to three possible channels for the screening of the magnetism of the impurity. For most 3d impurities the expected physics is similar to that of the underscreened Kondo model, with singular Fermi liquid behavior…
The supercritical instability in a system of two identical charged impurities in gapped graphene described in the continuous limit by the two-dimensional Dirac equation has been studied. The case where the charge of each impurity is subcritical, but their sum exceeds the critical value calculated in the version with a single Coulomb center, is considered. Using the developed variational method, the dependence of the critical distance $R_{\rm cr}$ between the impurities on their total charge is calculated. The $R_{\rm cr}$-value is found to grow as the total impurity charge increases and the qu…
We discuss models of interacting magnetic impurities coupled to a metallic host. If twice the sum of the impurity spins is larger than the total number of host screening channels, the system shows one or more quantum phase transitions where the ground-state spin changes as a function of the inter-impurity couplings. The simplest example is realized by two spin-1/2 Kondo impurities coupled to a single orbital of the host; this model exhibits a singlet-doublet transition. We investigate the phase diagram and crossover behavior of this model and present Numerical Renormalization Group results tog…
Impurity screening by defects in (1+1)$d$ quantum critical systems
School of Physics and Wuhan National High Magnetic Field Center, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学物理学院与武汉国家强磁场科学中心）；Faculty of Physics and Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑大学物理系与阿诺德·索末菲理论物理中心）；Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学理论物理研究所）；Department of Physics, Yale University（耶鲁大学物理系）
We theoretically study the transport properties of both monolayer and bilayer graphene in the presence of electron-hole puddles induced by charged impurities which are invariably present in the graphene environment. We calculate the graphene conductivity by taking into account the non-mean-field two-component nature of transport in the highly inhomogeneous density and potential landscape, where activated transport across the potential fluctuations in the puddle regimes coexists with regular metallic diffusive transport. The existence of puddles allows the local activation at low carrier densit…
Magnetic impurities in neutral graphene provide a realization of the pseudogap Kondo model, which displays a quantum phase transition between phases with screened and unscreened impurity moment. Here, we present a detailed study of the pseudogap Kondo model with finite chemical potential mu. While carrier doping restores conventional Kondo screening at lowest energies, properties of the quantum critical fixed point turn out to influence the behavior over a large parameter range. Most importantly, the Kondo temperature T_K shows an extreme asymmetry between electron and hole doping. At critical…
We present a quasiparticle interference study of clean and Mn surface-doped TaAs, a prototypical Weyl semimetal, to test the screening properties as well as the stability of Fermi arcs against Coulomb and magnetic scattering. Contrary to topological insulators, the impurities are effectively screened in Weyl semimetals. The adatoms significantly enhance the strength of the signal such that theoretical predictions on the potential impact of Fermi arcs can be unambiguously scrutinized. Our analysis reveals the existence of three extremely short, previously unknown scattering vectors. Comparison …
In three-dimensional materials with a Dirac spectrum, weak short-ranged disorder is essentially irrelevant near the Dirac point. This is manifestly not the case for Coulomb disorder, where the long-ranged nature of the potential produced by charged impurities implies large fluctuations of the disorder potential even when impurities are sparse, and these fluctuations are screened by the formation of electron/hole puddles. In this paper I present a theory of such nonlinear screening of Coulomb disorder in three-dimensional Dirac systems, and I derive the typical magnitude of the disorder potenti…
Monolayer graphene is an example of materials with multi-valley electronic structure. In such materials, the valley index is being considered as an information carrier. Consequently, relaxation mechanisms leading to loss of valley information are of interest. Here, we calculate the rate of valley relaxation induced by charged impurities in graphene. A special model of graphene is applied, where the $p_z$ orbitals are two-dimensional Gaussian functions, with a spatial extension characterised by an effective Bohr radius $a_\textrm{eB}$. We obtain the valley relaxation rate by solving the Boltzma…
We study the dielectric properties of graphene in the presence of Rashba and intrinsic spin-orbit interactions in their most general form, i.e., for arbitrary frequency, wave vector, doping, and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) parameters. The main result consists in the derivation of closed analytical expressions for the imaginary as well as for the real part of the polarization function. Several limiting cases, e.g., the case of purely Rashba or purely intrinsic SOC, and the case of equally large Rashba and intrinsic coupling parameters are discussed. In the static limit the asymptotic behavior of …
A system of two exchange-coupled Kondo impurities in a magnetic field gives rise to a rich phase space hosting a multitude of correlated phenomena. Magnetic atoms on surfaces probed through scanning tunnelling microscopy provide an excellent platform to investigate coupled impurities, but typical high Kondo temperatures prevent field-dependent studies from being performed, rendering large parts of the phase space inaccessible. We present an integral study of pairs of Co atoms on insulating Cu2N/Cu(100), which each have a Kondo temperature of only 2.6 K. In order to cover the different regions …
We study the infrared conductivity of graphene at finite chemical potential and temperature taking into account the effect of phonons and disorder due to charged impurities and unitary scatterers. The screening of the long-range Coulomb potential is treated using the random phase approximation coupled to the coherent potential approximation. The effect of the electron-phonon coupling is studied in second-order perturbation theory. The theory has essentially one free parameter, namely, the number of charge impurities per carbon, n^{\rm C}_i. We find an anomalous enhancement of the conductivity …
Spin susceptibility of Anderson impurities is a key quantity in understanding the physics of Kondo screening. Traditional numerical renormalization group (NRG) calculation of the impurity contribution $χ_{\textrm{imp}}$ to susceptibility, defined originally by Wilson in a flat wide band, has been generalized before to structured conduction bands. The results brought about non-Fermi-liquid and diamagnetic Kondo behaviors in $χ_{\textrm{imp}}$, even when the bands are not gapped at the Fermi energy. Here, we use the full density-matrix (FDM) NRG to present high-quality data for the local suscept…
The interaction between the Fermi sea of conduction electrons and a non-adiabatic attractive impurity potential can lead to a power-law divergence in the tunneling probability of charge through the impurity. The resulting effect, known as the Fermi edge singularity (FES), constitutes one of the most fundamental many-body phenomena in quantum solid state physics. Here we report the first observation of FES for Dirac Fermions in graphene driven by isolated Coulomb impurities in the conduction channel. In high-mobility graphene devices on hexagonal boron nitride substrates, the FES manifests in a…
The singular density of states and the two Fermi wavevectors resulting from a ring-shaped or "Mexican hat" valence band give rise to unique trends in the charged impurity scattering rates and charged impurity limited mobilities. Ring shaped valence bands are common features of many monolayer and few-layer two-dimensional materials including the III-VI materials GaS, GaSe, InS, and InSe. The wavevector dependence of the screening, calculated within the random phase approximation, is so strong that it is the dominant factor determining the overall trends of the scattering rates and mobilities wi…
We present a detailed analysis of the electronic and optical properties of two-electron quantum dots with a two-dimensional Gaussian confinement potential. We study the effects of Coulomb impurities and the possibility of manipulate the entanglement of the electrons by controlling the confinement potential parameters. The degree of entanglement becomes highly modulated by both the location and charge screening of the impurity atom, resulting two regimes: one of low entanglement and other of high entanglement, with both of them mainly determined by the magnitude of the charge. It is shown that …
When a magnetic impurity exists in a metal, conduction electrons form a spin cloud that screens the impurity spin. This basic phenomenon is called the Kondo effect. Contrary to electric charge screening, the spin screening cloud occurs quantum coherently, forming spin-singlet entanglement with the impurity. Although the spins interact locally around the impurity, the cloud can spread out over micrometers. The Kondo cloud has never been detected to date, and its existence, a fundamental aspect of the Kondo effect, remains as a long-standing controversial issue. Here we present experimental evid…
We study the disorder potential induced by random Coulomb impurities at the surface of a topological insulator (TI). We use a simple model in which positive and negative impurities are distributed uniformly throughout the bulk of the TI, and we derive the magnitude of the disorder potential at the TI surface using a self-consistent theory based on the Thomas-Fermi approximation for screening by the Dirac mode. Simple formulas are presented for the mean squared potential both at the Dirac point and far from it, as well as for the characteristic size of electron/hole puddles at the Dirac point a…
