Effect of topology on the critical charge in graphene

Abstract

We show that the critical charge for the Dirac excitations in gapless graphene depends on the spatial topology of the sample. In particular, for graphene cones, the effective value of the critical charge can tend towards zero for a suitable angle of the conical sample. We discuss the nature of the scattering phase shifts, quasi-bound state energies and local density of states for a gapless graphene cone and determine the dependence of these physical quantities on the sample topology.