A family of finite-temperature electronic phase transitions in graphene multilayers

Abstract

Suspended Bernal-stacked graphene multilayers up to an unexpectedly large thickness exhibit a broken-symmetry ground state whose origin remains to be understood. We show that a finite-temperature second-order phase transition occurs in multilayers whose critical temperature (<i>T</i> _c) increases from 12 kelvins (K) in bilayers to 100 K in heptalayers. A comparison of the data with a phenomenological model inspired by a mean-field approach suggests that the transition is associated with the appearance of a self-consistent valley- and spin-dependent staggered potential that changes sign from one layer to the next, appearing at <i>T</i> _c and increasing upon cooling. The systematic evolution with thickness of several measured quantities imposes constraints on any microscopic theory aiming to analyze the nature of electronic correlations in this system.