Origin of Universal Optical Conductivity and Optical Stacking Sequence Identification in Multilayer Graphene

Abstract

We show that the origin of the universal optical conductivity in a normal $N$-layer graphene multilayer is an emergent chiral symmetry which guarantees that $\sigma(\omega)=N\sigma_{uni}$ in both low and high frequency limits. [$\sigma_{uni}=(\pi/2) e^2/h$]. We use this physics to relate intermediate frequency conductivity trends to qualitative characteristics of the multilayer stacking sequence.