Competing electronic instabilities of extended Hubbard models on the honeycomb lattice: A functional Renormalization Group calculation with high wavevector resolution

Abstract

We investigate the quantum many-body instabilities for electrons on the honeycomb lattice at half-filling with extended interactions, motivated by a description of graphene and related materials. We employ a recently developed fermionic functional Renormalization Group scheme which allows for highly resolved calculations of wavevector dependences in the low-energy effective interactions. We encounter the expected anti-ferromagnetic spin density wave for a dominant on-site repulsion between electrons, and charge order with different modulations for dominant pure $n$-th nearest neighbor repulsive interactions. Novel instabilities towards incommensurate charge density waves take place when non-local density interactions among several bond distances are included simultaneously. Moreover, for more realistic Coulomb potentials in graphene including enough non-local terms there is a suppression of charge order due to competition effects between the different charge ordering tendencies, and if the on-site term fails to dominate, the semi-metallic state is rendered stable. The possibility of a topological Mott insulator being the favored tendency for dominating second nearest neighbor interactions is not realized in our results with high momentum resolution.