Ferromagnetism in ABC-stacked trilayer graphene

Abstract

In this article we study the ferromagnetic behavior of ABC-stacked trilayer graphene. This is done using a nearest-neighbor tight-binding model, in the presence of long-range Coulomb interactions. For a given electron-electron interaction $g$ and doping level $n$, we determine whether the total energy is minimized for a paramagnetic or ferromagnetic configuration of our variational parameters. The $g$ versus $n$ phase diagram is first calculated for the unscreened case. We then include the effects of screening using a simplified expression for the fermion bubble diagram. We show that ferromagnetism in ABC-stacked trilayer graphene is more robust than in monolayer, in bilayer, and in ABA-stacked trilayer graphene. Although the screening reduces the ferromagnetic regime in ABC-stacked trilayer graphene, the critical doping level remains one order of magnitude larger than in unscreened bilayer graphene.