Chiral condensate with topological degeneracy in graphene and its manifestation in edge states

Abstract

Role of chiral symmetry in many-body states of graphene in strong magnetic fields is theoretically studied with the honeycomb lattice model. For a spin-split Landau level where the leading electron-electron interaction is the nearest-neighbor repulsion, a chiral condensate is shown to be, within the subspace of n = 0 Landau level, an exact many-body ground state with a finite gap, for which calculation of Chern numbers reveals that the ground state is a Hall insulator with a topological degeneracy of two. The topological nature of the ground state is shown to manifest itself as a Kekul\'ean bond order along armchair edges, while the pattern melts in the bulk due to quantum fluctuations. The whole story can be regarded as a realization of the bulk-edge correspondence peculiar to the chiral symmetry.