Planar QED at finite temperature and density: Hall conductivity, Berry's phases and minimal conductivity of graphene

C.G. BENEVENTANO; PAOLA GIACCONI; E.M. SANTANGELO; ROBERTO SOLDATI

JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: London; Año: 2009 vol. 42 p. 275401 - 275426

1751-8113

We study 1-loop effects for massless Dirac fields in two spatial dimensions, coupled to homogeneous electromagnetic backgrounds, both at zero and at finite temperature and density. In the case of a purely magnetic field, we analyze the relationship between the invariance of the theory under large gauge transformations, the appearance of Chern-Simons terms and of different Berry´s phases. In the case of a purely electric background field, we show that the effective Lagrangian is independent of the chemical potential and of the temperature. More interesting: we show that the minimal conductivity, as predicted by the quantum field theory, is the right multiple of the conductivity quantum and is, thus, consistent with the value measured for graphene, with no extra factor of pi in the denominator.