Paper detail

Hybrid Monte-Carlo simulation of interacting tight-binding model of graphene

In this work, results are presented of Hybrid-Monte-Carlo simulations of the tight-binding Hamiltonian of graphene, coupled to an instantaneous long-range two-body potential which is modeled by a Hubbard-Stratonovich auxiliary field. We present an investigation of the spontaneous breaking of the sublattice symmetry, which corresponds to a phase transition from a conducting to an insulating phase and which occurs when the effective fine-structure constant $α$ of the system crosses above a certain threshold $α_C$. Qualitative comparisons to earlier works on the subject (which used larger system sizes and higher statistics) are made and it is established that $α_C$ is of a plausible magnitude in our simulations. Also, we discuss differences between simulations using compact and non-compact variants of the Hubbard field and present a quantitative comparison of distinct discretization schemes of the Euclidean time-like dimension in the Fermion operator.