Broken-Symmetry States of Dirac Fermions in Graphene with a Partially Filled High Landau Level

Abstract

We report on numerical study of the Dirac fermions in partially filled N=3 Landau level (LL) in graphene. At half-filling, the equal-time density-density correlation function displays sharp peaks at nonzero wave vectors +/-q*. Finite-size scaling shows that the peak value grows with electron number and diverges in the thermodynamic limit, which suggests an instability toward a charge density wave. A symmetry broken stripe phase is formed at large system size limit, which is robust against perturbation from disorder scattering. Such a quantum phase is experimentally observable through transport measurements. Associated with the special wave functions of the Dirac LL, both stripe and bubble phases become possible candidates for the ground state of the Dirac fermions in graphene with lower filling factors in the N=3 LL.