Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Graphene

Abstract

The question of whether the Coulomb interaction is strong enough to break the sublattice symmetry of un-doped graphene is discussed. We formulate a strong coupling expansion where the ground state of the Coulomb Hamiltonian is found exactly and the kinetic hopping Hamiltonian is treated as a perturbation. We argue that many of the properties of the resulting system would be shared by graphene with a Hubbard model interaction. In particular, the best candidate sublattice symmetry breaking ground state is an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator. We discuss the results of some numerical simulations which indicate that the Coulomb interaction is indeed subcritical. We also point out the curious fact that, if the electron did not have spin degeneracy, the tendency to break chiral symmetry would be much greater and even relatively weak Coulomb interactions would likely gap the spectrum.