Ordered Loop Current States in Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

While single-layer graphene shows extraordinary phenomena which are stable against electronic interactions, the non-interacting state of bilayer graphene is unstable to infinitesimal interactions leading to one of many possible exotic states. Indeed a gapped state is found in experiments but none of the states proposed so far can provide full accounts of its properties. Here we show that a magnetoelectric (ME) state is consistent with the experimental observations. This state breaks time-reversal symmetry through a pair of spontaneously generated current loops in each layer, and has odd-parity with respect to the two layers. We also suggest further experiments to check whether the ME state is indeed the gapped state found in experiments.