Supercritical Coulomb Impurities in Gapped Graphene

Vitor M. Pereira, Valeri N. Kotov, A. H. Castro Neto

Published 2008-03-28, updated 2008-06-23Version 2

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.