Sublattice engineering and voltage control of magnetism in triangular single and bi-layer graphene quantum dots

When a Dirac electron is confined to a triangular graphene quantum dot with zigzag edges, its low-energy spectrum collapses to a shell of degenerate states at the Fermi level leading to a magnetized edge. The shell degeneracy and the total magnetization are proportional to the edge size and can be made macroscopic. In this review, we start with a general discussion of magnetic properties of graphene structures and its relation to broken sublattice symmetry. Then, we discuss single electronic properties of single and bilayer triangular graphene quantum dots, focusing on the nature of edge states. Finally, we investigate the role of electronic correlations in determining the nature of ground state and excitation spectra of triangular graphene quantum dots as a function of dot size and filling fraction of the shell of zero-energy states. The interactions are treated by a combination of tight-binding, Hartree-Fock and configuration interaction methods. We show that the spin polarization of the triangular graphene quantum dots can be controlled through gating, i.e., by adding or removing electrons. In bilayer graphene dots, the relative filling of edge states in each layer and the magnetization can be tuned down to single localized spin using an external vertical electrical field. (C) 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim