Skyrme crystal in bilayer and multilayer graphene

Yasuhisa Sakurai, Daijiro Yoshioka

Published 2011-11-19, updated 2012-01-31Version 3

The ground state of the two-dimensional electron systems in Bernal bilayer and ABC-stacked multilayer graphenes in the presence of a strong magnetic field is investigated with the Hartree-Fock approximation. Phase diagrams of the systems are obtained, focusing on charge density wave states including states with vortices of valley pseudospins (called a Skyrme crystal). The single-electron states in these stacked graphenes are given by two-component wave functions. That of the first excited Landau level has the same component as the lowest Landau level of the ordinary two-dimensional electrons. Because of this localized wave functions, the Skyrme crystal has low energy in this first excited level up to four layers of graphene, when the inter-layer distance is assumed to be infinitesimal. At the same time, bubble crystals are suppressed, so the phase diagram is different from that of a single-layer graphene.