Orbital magnetism of graphene nanostructures: Bulk and confinement effects

Abstract

We consider the orbital magnetic properties of non-interacting charge carriers in graphene-based nanostructures in the low-energy regime. The magnetic response of such systems results both, frombulk contributions and from confinement effects that can be particularly strong in ballistic quantum dots. First we provide a comprehensive study of the magnetic susceptibility $\chi$ of bulk graphene in a magnetic field for the different regimes arising from the relative magnitudes of the energy scales involved, i.e. temperature, Landau level spacing and chemical potential. We show that for finite temperature or chemical potential, $\chi$ is not divergent although the diamagnetic contribution $\chi_{0}$ from the filled valance band exhibits the well-known $-B^{-1/2}$ dependence. We further derive oscillatory modulations of $\chi$, corresponding to de Haas-van Alphen oscillations of conventional two-dimensional electron gases. These oscillations can be large in graphene, thereby compensating the diamagnetic contribution $\chi_{0}$ and yielding a net paramagnetic susceptibility for certain energy and magnetic field regimes. Second, we predict and analyze corresponding strong, confinement-induced susceptibility oscillations in graphene-based quantum dots with amplitudes distincly exceeding the corresponding bulk susceptibility. Within a semiclassical approach we derive generic expressions for orbital magnetism of graphene quantum dots with regular classical dynamics. Graphene-specific features can be traced back to pseudospin interference along the underlying periodic orbits. We demonstrate the quality of the semiclassical approximation by comparison with quantum mechanical results for two exemplary mesoscopic systems, a graphene disk with infinite mass-type edges and a rectangular graphene structure with armchair and zigzag edges, using numerical tight-binding calculations in the latter case.