Unique electronic band structure of graphene with its semi-metallic features near the charge neutrality point is sensitive to impurity effects. Using the Lifshitz and Anderson impurity models, we study in detail the disorder induced spectral phenomena in the electronic band structure of graphene, namely, the formation of resonances, quasi-gaps, bound states, impurity sub-bands, and their overall impact on the electronic band restructuring and the associated Mott-like metal-insulator transitions. We perform systematic analytical and numerical study for realistic impurities, both substitutional and adsorbed, focusing on those effects that stem from the impurity adatoms locations (top, bridge, and hollow positions), concentration, host sublattice occupation, perturbation strengths, etc. Possible experimental and practical implications are discussed as well.
In this review we highlight recent theoretical and experimental work on sublattice asymmetric doping of impurities in graphene, with a focus on substitutional Nitrogen dopants. It is well known that one current limitation of graphene in regards to its use in electronics is that in its ordinary state it exhibits no band gap. By doping one of its two sublattices preferentially it is possible to not only open such a gap, which can furthermore be tuned through control of the dopant concentration, but in theory produce quasi-ballistic transport of electrons in the undoped sublattice, both important…
The local properties of bilayer graphene (BLG) due to the spatial inhomogeneity of its sublattices are of interest. We apply Anderson impurity model to consider the local moment formation on a magnetic impurity which could be adsorbed on different sublattices of BLG. We find different features for the impurity magnetization when it is adsorbed A and B sublattices. The impurity adsorbed on A sublattice can magnetize even when the impurity level is above the Fermi level and the on-site coulomb energy is very small. But when the impurity is adsorbed on B sublattice the magnetization is possible f…
Spin manipulation is one of the most critical challenges to realize spin-based logic devices and spintronic circuits. Graphene has been heralded as an ideal material to achieve spin manipulation but so far new paradigms and demonstrators are limited. Here we show that certain impurities such as fluorine ad-atoms, which locally break sublattice symmetry without the formation of strong magnetic moment, could result in a remarkable variability of spin transport characteristics. The impurity resonance level is found to be associated with a long range sublattice pseudospin polarization, which by lo…
We report a detailed analytic investigation of the interplay between size quantization and local scattering centers in armchair graphene nanoribbons, as seen in the conductance. The scattering property of a local scattering center is dependent on if it is located on one sublattice (A-site impurity) or both (impurity situated at neighboring carbon atoms, A-B-site impurity). The A-site impurity scatters in a similar way as a localized impurity in a one-dimensional channel made from a two-dimensional electron gas. On the other hand, the A-B-site impurity introduces A- to B-sublattice scattering, …
We study the interacting, symmetrically coupled single impurity Anderson model. By employing the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism, we establish an exact relationship between the steady-state charge current flowing through the impurity (dot) and its occupation. We argue that the steady state current-occupation relation can be used to assess the consistency of simulation techniques, and identify spurious transport phenomena. We test this relation in two different model variants: First, we study the Anderson-Holstein model in the strong electron-vibration coupling limit using the polaron…
We theoretically investigate the spin resolved Friedel oscillation (FO) and quasiparticle interference (QPI) in graphene induced by an Anderson impurity. Once the impurity becomes magnetic, the resulted FO becomes spin dependent, which gives rise to a local magnetic moment oscillation with an envelop decaying as $r^{-2}$ in real space in the doping cases. Meanwhile, at half filling, the charge density and local magnetic moment will not oscillate but decay as $r^{-3}$. Such spin resolved FO has both sublattice and spin asymmetry. Interestingly, the local magnetic moment decay at half filling on…
Using the Green's function method, we study the effect of an impurity potential on the electronic structure of the honeycomb lattice in the one-band tight-binding model that contains both the nearest neighbor ($t$) and the second neighbor ($t'$) interactions. The model is relevant to the case of the substitutional vacancy in graphene. If the second neighbor interaction is large enough ($t' > t /3$), then the linear Dirac bands no longer occur at the Fermi energy and the electronic structure is therefore fundamentally changed. With only the nearest neighbor interactions present, there is partic…
Renowned for its sensitivity to detect the presence of numerous substances, graphene is an excellent chemical sensor. Unfortunately, which general features a dopant must have in order to enter the list of substances detectable by graphene are not exactly known. Here we demonstrate with a simple model calculation implemented in three different ways that one of such features is the symmetry properties of the impurity binding to graphene. In particular, we show that electronic scattering is suppressed when dopants are bound symmetrically to both graphene sub-lattices, giving rise to impurity invi…
We report a detailed investigation of the interplay between size quantization and local scattering centers in graphene nanoribbons, as seen in the local density of states. The spectral signatures, obtained after Fourier transformation of the local density of states, include characteristic peaks that can be related to the transverse modes of the nanoribbon. In armchair ribbons, the Fourier transformed density of states of one of the two inequivalent sublattices takes a form similar to that of a quantum channel in a two-dimensional electron gas, modified according to the differences in bandstruc…
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…
The aim of this work is to describe the electronic properties of graphene in a constant magnetic field in the long wavelength approximation with random binary disorder, by solving the Soven equation self-consistently. Density of state contributions for different valleys in each sublattice sites are obtained for different values of magnetic field strength showing remarkable differences between K and K' valleys. A band gap is obtained by an asymmetric on-site impurity concentration and the graphene electrons acquire an anomalous magnetic moment, which is opposite in different valleys, which depe…
Recent experimental observations have reported that, rather than randomly distributed, nitrogen atoms may prefer to be located on one of the two sub-lattices of graphene. It has been suggested that such a preference may present a possible avenue to tailor the band gap of graphene whilst maintaining its excellent electronic transport properties. Among the proposed mechanisms to explain this effect is the suggestion that long-range inter-impurity interactions mediated by the conduction electrons of graphene may give rise to the asymmetry between sub-lattice occupations. Electron-mediated interac…
Recent experimental findings and theoretical predictions suggest that nitrogen-doped CVD-grown graphene may give rise to electronic band gaps due to impurity distributions which favour segregation on a single sublattice. Here we demonstrate theoretically that such distributions give rise to more complex behaviour in the presence of edges, where geometry determines whether electrons in the sample view the impurities as a gap-opening average potential or as scatterers. Zigzag edges give rise to the latter case, and remove the electronic bandgaps predicted in extended graphene samples. We predict…
We study optically-induced collective excitations of graphene in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field and a single impurity. We determine the energies and absorption strengths of these excitations, which become localised on the impurity. Two different types of impurity are considered i. the long-range Coulomb impurity, ii. a delta-function impurity located at either an A or B graphene sublattice site. Both impurity types result in some bound states appearing both above and below the magnetoplasmon continuum, although the effect of the short-range impurity is less pronounced. T…
Entropic signatures of the single-impurity Kondo state
Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学斯图尔特·布拉斯森量子物质研究所）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学物理与天文学系）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University（普渡大学物理与天文学系）；Microsoft Quantum（微软量子）
We theoretically investigate the impurity levels and exchange interaction between magnetic impurities in graphene driven by an off-resonant circularly polarized light field. Our analysis captures the non-perturbative effects resulting from scattering with magnetic impurities with a strong onsite potential. Under irradiation, a dynamical band gap opens up at the Dirac point, allowing impurity levels to exist inside the gap. These impurity levels are shown to give rise to a resonance feature in the exchange energy for impurities located either at the same or different sublattices. The exchange i…
The charge transport properties of zero-temperature multi-orbital quantum dot systems with one dot coupled to leads and the other dots coupled only capacitatively are studied within density functional theory. It is shown that the setup is equivalent to an effective single impurity Anderson model. This allows to understand the level occupation switching effect as transitions between ground states of different integer occupations in the uncoupled dots. Level occupation switching is very sensitive to small energy differences and therefore also to the details of the parametrized exchange-correlati…
Atomic collapse can be observed in graphene because of its large "effective" fine structure constant, which enables this phenomenon to occur for an impurity charge as low as $Z_c\sim 1-2$. Here, we investigate the effect of the sublattice symmetry on molecular collapse in two spatially separated charge tunable vacancies, that are located on the same (A-A type) or different (A-B type) sublattices. We find that the broken sublattice symmetry: (1) does not affect the location of the main bonding and anti-bonding molecular collapse peaks, (2) but shifts the position of the satellite peaks, because…
Among the different strategies used to induce the opening of a band gap in graphene, one common practice is through chemical doping. While a gap may me opened in this way, disorder-induced scattering is an unwanted side-effect that impacts the electron mobility in the conductive regime of the system. However, this undesirable side effect is known to be minimised if dopants interact asymmetrically with the two sublattices of graphene. In this work we propose that mechanical strain can be used to introduce such a sublattice asymmetry in the doping process of graphene. We argue that a localised o…
Kondo physics in doped monolayer graphene is predicted to exhibit unusual features due to the linear vanishing of the pristine material's density of states at the Dirac point. Despite several attempts, conclusive experimental observation of the phenomenon remains elusive. One likely obstacle to identification is a very small Kondo temperature scale $T_K$ in situations where the chemical potential lies near the Dirac point. We propose tailored mechanical deformations of monolayer graphene as a means of revealing unique fingerprints of the Kondo effect. Inhomogeneous strains are known to produce…
The modification of the quantum states in a Dice lattice due to a Coulomb impurity are investigated. The energy band structure of a pristine Dice lattice consists of a Dirac cone and a flat band at the Dirac point. We use the tight binding formalism and find that the flat band states transform into a set of discrete bound states whose electron density is localized on a ring around the impurity mainly on two of the three sublattices. The energy is proportional to the strength of the Coulomb impurity. Beyond a critical strength of the Coulomb potential atomic collapse states appear that have som…
We present the complete formalism that describes scattering in graphene at low-energies. We begin by analyzing the real-space free Green's function matrix, and its analytical expansions at low-energy, carefully incorporating the discrete lattice structure, and arbitrary forms of the atomic-orbital wave function. We then compute the real-space Green's function in the presence of an impurity. We express our results both in 2X2 and 4X4 forms (for the two sublattices and the two inequivalent valleys of the first Brillouin zone). We compare this with the 4X4 formalism proposed in cond-mat/0608228 a…
We investigate time-resolved charge transport through graphene nanoribbons supplemented with adsorbed impurity atoms. Depending on the location of the impurities with respect to the hexagonal carbon lattice, the transport properties of the system may become invisible to the impurity due to the symmetry properties of the binding mechanism. This motivates a chemical sensing device since dopants affecting the underlying sublattice symmetry of the pristine graphene nanoribbon introduce scattering. Using the time-dependent Landauer--B{ü}ttiker formalism, we extend the stationary current-voltage pic…
The interaction of two resonant impurities in graphene has been predicted to have a long-range character with weaker repulsion when the two adatoms reside on the same sublattice and stronger attraction when they are on different sublattices. We reveal that this attraction results from a single energy level. This opens up a possibility of controlling the sign of the impurity interaction via the adjustment of the chemical potential. For many randomly distributed impurities (adatoms or vacancies) this may offer a way to achieve a controlled transition from aggregation to dispersion.
The effective spin exchange coupling between impurities (adatoms) on graphene mediated by conduction electrons is studied as a function of the strength of the potential part of the on-site energy $U$ of the electron-adatom interaction. With increasing $U$, the exchange coupling becomes long-range, determined largely by the impurity levels with energies close to the Dirac points. When adatoms reside on opposite sublattices, their exchange coupling, normally antiferromagnetic, becomes ferromagnetic and resonantly enhanced at a specific distance where an impurity level crosses the Dirac point.
In this work we analyze the effects of the application of an external electric field in the formation of a local magnetic moment in silicene. By adding an impurity in a top site in the host lattice and computing the real and imaginary part of the self-energy of the impurity energy level, the polarized density of states is used in order to obtain the occupation number of the up and down spin formation in the impurity considering the mean field approximation. Unequal occupation numbers is the precursor of a formation of a local magnetic moment and this depends critically on the Hubbard parameter…
We study the RKKY interaction between two magnetic impurities located on same layer (intralayer case) or on different layers (interlayer case) in undoped bilayer graphene in the four-bands model, by directly calculating the Green functions in the eigenvalues and eigenvectors representation. Our results show that both intra- and interlayer RKKY interactions between two magnetic impurities located on same (opposite) sublattice are always ferromagnetic (antiferromagnetic). Furthermore we find unusual long-distance decay of the RKKY interaction in BLG. The intralyer RKKY interactions between two m…
The variable range hopping theory, as formulated for exponentially localized impurity states, does not necessarily apply in the case of graphene with covalently attached impurities. We analyze the localization of impurity states in graphene using the nearest-neighbor, tight-binding model of an adatom-graphene system with Green's function perturbation methods. The amplitude of the impurity state wave function is determined to decay as a power law with exponents depending on sublattice, direction, and the impurity species. We revisit the variable range hopping theory in view of this result and f…
Restructuring of electronic spectrum in a buckled silicene monolayer under some applied voltage between its two sublattices and in presence of certain impurity atoms is considered. A special attention is given to formation of localized impurity levels within the band gap and the to their collectivization at finite impurity concentration. It is shown that a qualitative restructuring of quasiparticle spectrum within the initial band gap and then specific metal-insulator phase transitions are possible for such disordered system and can be effectively controlled by variation of the electric field …
Within the frame of quantum dissipation theory, we develop a new hierarchical equations of motion theory, combined with the small polaron transformation. We fully investigate the electron transport of a single attractive impurity system with the strong electron-phonon coupling in charge- Kondo regime. Numerical results demonstrate the following facts: (i) The density of states curve shows that the attraction mechanism results in not only the charge-Kondo resonance (i.e. elastic pair-transition resonance), but also the inelastic pair-transition resonances and inelastic cotunneling resonances. T…
By applying a magnetic field whose Zeeman energy exceeds the Kondo energy by an order of magnitude the ground state of the Friedel-Anderson impurity is a magnetic state. In recent years the author introduced the Friedel Artificially Inserted Resonance (FAIR) method to investigate impurity properties. Within this FAIR approach the magnetic ground state is derived. Its full excitation spectrum and the composition of the excitations is calculated and numerically evaluated. From the excitation spectrum the electron density of states is calculated. Majority and minority d-resonances are obtained. T…
We investigate the many-body effects of a magnetic adatom in ferromagnetic graphene by using the numerical renormalization group method. The nontrivial band dispersion of ferromagnetic graphene gives rise to interesting Kondo physics different from that in conventional ferromagnetic materials. For a half-filled impurity in undoped graphene, the presence of ferromagnetism can bring forth Kondo correlations, yielding two kink structures in the local spectral function near the Fermi energy. When the spin splitting of local occupations is compensated by an external magnetic field, the two Kondo ki…
We present a numerical study on the intraband optical conductivity of hot carriers at quasi-equilibria in photoexcited graphene based on the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equations (BTE) with the aim of understanding the effects of intrinsic optical phonon and extrinsic coulomb scattering caused by charged impurities at the graphene--substrate interface. Instead of using full-BTE solutions, we employ iterative solutions of the BTE and the comprehensive model for the temporal evolutions of hot-carrier temperature and hot-optical-phonon occupations to reduce computational costs. Undoped grap…
Bilayer graphene has two non-equivalent sublattices and, therefore, the same adatom impurity can manifest in spectrally distinct ways-sharp versus broad resonances near the charge neutrality-depending on the sublattice it adsorbs at. Employing Green's function analytical methods and the numerical Kwant package we investigate the spectral and transport interplay between the resonances and superconducting coherence induced in bilayer graphene by proximity to an s-wave superconductor. Analyzing doping and temperature dependencies of quasi-particle spin-relaxation rates, energies of Yu-Shiba-Rusin…
Monolayer B$_2$S has been recently unveiled as a desirable honeycomb monolayer with an anisotropic Dirac cone. We investigate the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yoshida (RKKY) interaction, between two magnetic impurity moments in armchair-terminated B$_2$S nanoribbons in the presence of strain and staggered sublattice potential. By using an accurate tight-binding model, we firstly study the electronic properties of all infinite-length armchair B$_2$S nanoribbons (ABSNRs), with different edges, in the presence of both strain and staggered potential. The ABSNRs show different electronic and magnetic beh…
We introduce a computationally efficient method based on the path integral formalism to describe defect-modified graphene. By taking into account the entire Brillouin zone, our approach respects the lattice symmetry and can be used to investigate both short-range and long-range effects. The proposed method's key advantage is that the computational complexity does not increase with the system size, scaling, instead, with the number of defects. As a demonstration of our method, we explore the graphene-mediated RKKY interaction between multiple magnetic impurities. Our results concur with earlier…
We study the carrier-mediated exchange interaction, the so-called RKKY coupling, between two magnetic moments in graphene using exact diagonalization on the honeycomb lattice. By using the tight-binding nearest neighbor band structure of graphene we avoid the use of a momentum cut-off which plagues results in the Dirac continuum model formulation. We extract both the short and long impurity-impurity distance behavior and show several corrections to earlier long distance results. In the bulk the RKKY coupling is proportional to $1/|{\bf R}|^3$ and displays $(1+\cos(2{\bf k}_D\cdot {\bf R})$-typ…
We study the band dispersion of graphene with randomly distributed structural defects using two complementary methods, exact diagonalization of the tight-binding Hamiltonian and implementing a self-consistent T matrix approximation. We identify three distinct types of impurities resulting in qualitatively different spectra in the vicinity of the Dirac point. First, resonant impurities, such as vacancies or 585 defects, lead to stretching of the spectrum at the Dirac point with a finite density of localized states. This type of spectrum has been observed in epitaxial graphene by photoemission s…
We study the mesoscopic Kondo box, consisting of a quantum spin 1/2 interacting with a chaotic electronic bath as can be realized by a magnetic impurity coupled to electrons on a quantum dot, using a mean-field approach for the Kondo interaction. Its umerical efficiency allows us to analyze the Kondo temperature, the local magnetic susceptibility, and the conductance statistics for a large number of samples with energy levels obtained by random matrix theory. We see pronounced parity effects in the average values and in the probability distributions, depending on an even and odd electronic occ…
We investigate the electron properties of the monolayer and bilayer silicene which is the honeycomb lattice consist of silicon atoms, including the optical conductivity and charged impurity scattering, due to the quasipatricle Dirac-like behaviors near the K-point of silicene. The spin, valley, sublattice degrees of freedom are taken into consider in the multi-band tight-binding model. In momentum space, the scattering matrix which connects the two bare (without interaction) Green's functions in the quasiparticle momentum transport process, could be momentum-independent for the single impuirit…
