Condensed Matter Seminars

A single sheet or graphite, or graphene, in its natural state is a semimetal with two Fermi points in its Brillouin zone. The low-energy excitations near those points are equivalent to massless relativistic fermions, with the Fermi velocity assuming the role of the speed of light. I will discuss the effects of Coulomb interaction between electrons in such a system at zero and finite magnetic field. The integer Hall effect in graphene will be explained as the combination of the Landau level quantization and spontaneous breaking of the emerging "chiral" symmetry in such a quasi-relativistic system.