Instabilities of the AA-stacked graphene bilayer

Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Nov 16;109(20):206801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.206801. Epub 2012 Nov 13.

Abstract

Tight-binding calculations predict that the AA-stacked bilayer graphene has one electron and one hole conducting band, and that the Fermi surfaces of these bands coincide. We demonstrate that as a result of this degeneracy, the bilayer becomes unstable with respect to a set of spontaneous symmetry violations. Which of the symmetries is broken depends on the microscopic details of the system. For strong on-site Coulomb interaction we find that antiferromagnetism is the most stable order parameter. For an on-site repulsion energy typical for graphene systems, the antiferromagnetic gap can exist up to room temperature.