1302.0150 (Wes Armour et al.)

Monte Carlo Study of Strongly-Interacting Degenerate Fermions: a Model
for Voltage-Biased Bilayer Graphene    [PDF]

Wes Armour, Simon Hands, Costas Strouthos

We formulate a model of N_f=4 flavors of relativistic fermion in 2+1d in the presence of a chemical potential mu coupled to two flavor doublets with opposite sign, akin to isopsin chemical potential in QCD. This is argued to be an effective theory for low energy electronic excitations in bilayer graphene, in which an applied voltage between the layers ensures equal populations of particles on one layer and holes on the other. The model is then reformulated on a spacetime lattice using staggered fermions, and in the absence of a sign problem, simulated using an orthodox hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm. With the coupling strength chosen to be close to a quantum critical point believed to exist for N_fView original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0150