Antiferromagnetism and Competing Charge Instabilities of Electrons in Strained Graphene from Coulomb Interactions

We study the quantum many-body ground states of electrons on the half-filled honeycomb lattice with short- and long-ranged density-density interactions as a model for graphene. To this end, we employ the recently developed truncated-unity functional renormalization group (TUfRG) approach which allows for a high resolution of the interaction vertex’ wavevector dependence. We connect to previous lattice quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results which predict a stabilization of the semimetallic phase for realistic ab initio interaction parameters and confirm that the application of a finite biaxial strain can induce a quantum phase transition towards an ordered ground state. In contrast to lattice QMC simulations, the TU-fRG is not limited in the choice of tight-binding and interaction parameters to avoid the occurrence of a sign problem. Thus, we investigate a range of parameters relevant to the realistic graphene material which are not accessible by numerically exact methods. Although a plethora of charge density waves arises under medium-range interactions, we find the antiferromagnetic spin-density wave to be the prevailing instability for long-range interactions. We further explore the impact of an extended tight-binding Hamiltonian with second-nearest neighbor hopping.