Excitonic condensation of massless fermions in graphene bilayers

C. -H. Zhang, Yogesh N. Joglekar

Published 2008-03-24, updated 2008-05-02Version 2

Graphene, a single sheet of graphite with honeycomb lattice structure, has massless carriers with tunable density and polarity. We investigate the ground state phase diagram of two graphene sheets (embedded in a dielectric) separated by distance $d$ where the top layer has electrons and the bottom layer has holes, using mean-field theory. We find that a uniform excitonic condensate occurs over a large range of carrier densities and is weakly dependent on the relative orientation of the two sheets. We obtain the excitonic gap, quasiparticle energy and the density of states. We show that both, the condensate phase stiffness and the mass of the excitons, with massless particles as constituents, vary as the square-root of the carrier density, and predict that the condensate will not undergo Wigner crystallization.