Optical conductivity of disordered graphene beyond the Dirac cone approximation

Abstract

In this paper we systemically study the optical conductivity and density of states of disordered graphene beyond the Dirac cone approximation. The optical conductivity of graphene is computed by using the Kubo formula, within the framework of a full $\ensuremath{\pi}$-band tight-binding model. Different types of noncorrelated and correlated disorder are considered, such as random or Gaussian potentials, random or Gaussian nearest-neighbor hopping parameters, randomly distributed vacancies or their clusters, and randomly adsorbed hydrogen atoms or their clusters. For a large enough concentration of resonant impurities, an additional peak in the optical conductivity is found, associated with transitions between the midgap states and the Van Hove singularities of the main $\ensuremath{\pi}$ band. We further discuss the effect of doping on the spectrum, and find that small amounts of resonant impurities are enough to obtain a background contribution to the conductivity in the infrared part of the spectrum, in agreement with recent experiments.