Renormalization of Coulomb interaction in graphene: computing observable quantities

Abstract

We address the computation of physical observables in graphene in the presence of Coulomb interactions of density-density type modeled with a static Coulomb potential within a quantum field theory perturbative renormalization scheme. We show that all the divergences encountered in the physical quantities are associated to the one loop electron self-energy and can be determined without ambiguities by a proper renormalization of the Fermi velocity. The renormalization of the photon polarization to second order in perturbation theory - a quantity directly related to the optical conductivity - is given as an example.