Excitonic condensation in a double-layer graphene system

Abstract

The possibility of excitonic condensation in a recently proposed electrically biased double-layer graphene system is studied theoretically. The main emphasis is put on obtaining a reliable analytical estimate for the transition temperature into the excitonic state. As in a double-layer graphene system the total number of fermionic "flavors" is equal to N=8 due to two projections of spin, two valleys, and two layers, the large-$N$ approximation appears to be especially suitable for theoretical investigation of the system. On the other hand, the large number of flavors makes screening of the bare Coulomb interactions very efficient, which, together with the suppression of backscattering in graphene, leads to an extremely low energy of the excitonic condensation. It is shown that the effect of screening on the excitonic pairing is just as strong in the excitonic state as it is in the normal state. As a result, the value of the excitonic gap $\De$ is found to be in full agreement with the previously obtained estimate for the mean-field transition temperature $T_c$, the maximum possible value $Δ^{\rm max},T_c^{\rm max}\sim 10^{-7} ε_F$ ($ε_F$ is the Fermi energy) of both being in $ 1{\rm mK}$ range for a perfectly clean system. This proves that the energy scale $\sim 10^{-7} ε_F$ really sets the upper bound for the transition temperature and invalidates the recently expressed conjecture about the high-temperature first-order transition into the excitonic state. These findings suggest that, unfortunately, the excitonic condensation in graphene double-layers can hardly be realized experimentally.