RKKY coupling in graphene

Abstract

We study the carrier-mediated exchange interaction, the so-called RKKY coupling, between two magnetic moments in graphene using exact diagonalization on the honeycomb lattice. By using the tight-binding nearest neighbor band structure of graphene we avoid the use of a momentum cut-off which plagues results in the Dirac continuum model formulation. We extract both the short and long impurity-impurity distance behavior and show several corrections to earlier long distance results. In the bulk the RKKY coupling is proportional to $1/|{\bf R}|^3$ and displays $(1+\cos(2{\bf k}_D\cdot {\bf R})$-type oscillations. A-A sublattice coupling is always ferromagnetic whereas A-B subattice coupling is always antiferromagnetic and three times as large. We also study the effect of edges in zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs) and find that for impurities on the edge, the RKKY coupling decays exponentially because of the localized zero energy edge states. For impurities inside a ZGNR the bulk characteristics are quickly regained.