Stability, Collective Modes, and Quasiparticle-Phonon Coupling of Metallic Wigner Crystals in Rhombohedral Graphene

Abstract

Recent transport experiments in rhombohedral multilayer graphene have reported evidence for metallic Wigner crystals (mWCs), characterized by the coexistence of crystalline order and a small density of hole-like carriers. This coexistence raises fundamental questions about the stability of mWCs and the fate of their collective excitations in the presence of gapless fermions. Using self-consistent Hartree-Fock and time-dependent Hartree-Fock calculations, we demonstrate that itinerant carriers profoundly influence both. We find that mWCs with electron pockets are generally unstable to particle-hole fluctuations, while hole-doped mWCs at lower densities remain locally stable. In the stable hole-doped mWC, the longitudinal phonon strongly hybridizes with particle-hole excitations, while the transverse phonon remains relatively well defined. Quasiparticle coupling is strongly mode-dependent and is typically stronger for longitudinal-like excitations than for transverse modes. Our results demonstrate that self-doped carriers not only enable metallicity but also fundamentally reshape the stability, collective dynamics, and quasiparticle interactions of electronic crystals.