Bound States in Graphene

Kumar S. Gupta, Siddhartha Sen

Published 2008-05-22, updated 2008-06-03Version 3

We present a quantum analysis of the massless excitations in graphene with a charge impurity. When the effective charge exceeds a certain critical value, the spectrum is quantized and is unbounded from below. The corresponding eigenstates are square-integrable at infinity and have a rapidly oscillatory behaviour in the short distance, which can be interpreted as a fall to the centre. Using a cutoff regularization, we show that the effective Coulomb interaction strength is driven to its critical value under the renormalization group flow. In the subcritical region, we find bound states with imaginary values of the energy for certain range of the system parameters. The physical significance of these bound states with imaginary eigenvalues is discussed.