According to the extensive theoretical and experimental investigations, it is widely accepted that the long-range Coulomb interaction is too weak to generate a dynamical excitonic gap in graphene with a perfect Dirac cone. We study the impact of the deformation of Dirac cone on dynamical gap generation. When a uniaxial strain is applied to graphene, the Dirac cone is made elliptical in the equal-energy plane and the fermion velocity becomes anisotropic. The applied uniaxial strain has two effects: it decreases the fermion velocity; it increases the velocity anisotropy. After solving the Dyson-Schwinger gap equation, we show that dynamical gap generation is promoted by the former effect, but is suppressed by the latter one. For suspended graphene, we find that the systems undergoes an excitonic insulating transition when the strain is roughly 7.34%. We also solve the gap equation in case the Dirac cone is tiled, which might be realized in the organic material α-(BEDT-TTF)2I3, and find that the tilt of Dirac cone can suppress dynamical gap generation. It turns out that the geometry of the Dirac cone plays an important role in the formation of excitonic pairing.

We study the excitonic semimetal-insulator quantum phase transition in three-dimensional Dirac semimetal in which the fermion dispersion is strongly anisotropic. After solving the Dyson-Schwinger equation for the excitonic gap, we obtain a global phase diagram in the plane spanned by the parameter for Coulomb interaction strength and the parameter for fermion velocity anisotropy. We find that excitonic gap generation is promoted as the interaction becomes stronger, but is suppressed if the anisotropy increases. Applying our results to two realistic three-dimensional Dirac semimetals Na3Bi and Cd3As2, we establish that their exact zero-temperature ground state is gapless semimetal, rather than excitonic insulator. Moreover, these two materials are far from the excitonic quantum critical point, thus there should not be any observable evidence for excitonic insulating behavior. This conclusion is in general agreement with the existing experiments of Na3Bi and Cd3As2.

No abstract

Coherent absorption, as the time-reversed counterpart to laser, has been widely proposed recently to flexibly modulate light-matter interactions in two-dimensional materials. However, the multiband coherent perfect absorption (CPA) in atomically thin materials still has been elusive. We exploit the multiband CPA in vertically stacked metal/dielectric/graphene heterostructures via ultraconfined acoustic plasmons which can reduce the photon wavelength by a factor of about 70 and thus enable multiple-order resonances on a graphene ribbon of finite width. Under the illumination of two counter-propagating coherent beams, the two-stage coupling scheme is used for exciting multispectral acoustic plasmon resonances on the heterostructure simultaneously, thereby contributing to the ultimate multiband CPA in the mid-infrared region. The strong dependence of the nearly linear dispersion of acoustic plasmons on the chemical potential in graphene and the separation between the metal and the graphene allows the tunability in spectral positions of absorption peaks. Intriguingly, the absorption of each resonant peak is continuously tuned by varying the relative amplitude of two counter-propagating beams, and even their phase difference, respectively. The maximum modulation depth of 4.46*105 is observed. The scattering matrix is employed to demonstrate the principle of CPA and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations are used for elucidating the flexible tunability. More importantly, the multiband coherent absorber is robust to the incident angle, and thus undoubtedly benefits extensive applications on optoelectronic and engineering technology areas for modulators and optical switches.

No abstract