Mean-field analysis reveals various electronic and magnetic phases in graphene grain boundaries, suggesting implications for spintronics.
We study the ground state phase diagram of the extended Hubbard model in a half-filled 5/7 skewed ladder, which is topologically equivalent to a \{112\} grain boundary in graphene and related systems. Using the mean-field method, we identify various electronic and magnetic phases in the U-V plane, by calculating the site charge and spin densities. The electronic phases include partially charge-ordered metal or insulator, and fully charge-ordered insulator. The different magnetic phases of the model are non-magnet, spin density wave, spin split compensated ferrimagnet or partial antiferromagnet. Analysis of the electronic band structure reveals that the partially charge-ordered compensated ferrimagnetic phase exhibits spin polarisation, which can be quite interesting for spintronics applications. We also compute the polarisation as a function of U using the Berry phase formalism and show that the system exhibits multiferroicity with coexisting compensated ferrimagnetic spin order alongside electronic polarisations.
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Jana et al. (2025) studied this question.
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