Stable local moments of vacancies, substitutional and hollow site impurities in graphene

Abstract

The two-sublattice nature of graphene lattice in conjunction with three-fold rotational symmetry, allows for the p-wave hybridization of the impurity state with the Bloch states of carbon atoms. Such an opportunity is not available in normal metals where the wave function is scalar. The p-wave hybridization function appears when dealing with vacancies, substitutional adatoms and the hollow site impurities while the s-wave mixing on graphene lattice pertains only to the top site impurities. In this work, we compare the local moment formation in these two cases and find that the local moments formed by p-wave mixing compared to the s-wave one are robust against the changes in the parameters of the model. Furthermore, we investigate the stability of the local moments in the above cases. We find that the quantum fluctuations can destroy the local moments in the case of s-wave hybridization, while the local moments formed by p-wave hybridization survive the quantum fluctuations. Based on these findings, we propose vacancies, substitutional adatoms, and hollow site adatoms as possible candidates to produce stable local moments in graphene.