Effective low-energy Hamiltonians for interacting nanostructures

We present a functional renormalization group (fRG) treatment of trigonal graphene nanodisks and composites thereof, modeled by finite-size Hubbard-like Hamiltonians with honeycomb lattice structure. At half filling, the noninteracting spectrum of these structures contains a certain number of half-filled states at the Fermi level. For the case of trigonal nanodisks, including interactions between these degenerate states was argued to lead to a large ground state spin with potential spintronics applications [M. Ezawa, Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 543 (2009)]. Here we perform a systematic fRG flow where the excited single-particle states are integrated out with a decreasing energy cutoff, yielding a renormalized low-energy Hamiltonian for the zero-energy states that includes effects of the excited levels. The numerical implementation corroborates the results obtained with a simpler Hartree-Fock treatment of the interaction effects within the zero-energy states only. In particular, for trigonal nanodisks the degeneracy of the one-particle-states with zero energy turns out to be protected against influences of the higher levels. As an explanation, we give a general argument that within this fRG scheme the zero-energy degeneracy remains unsplit under quite general conditions and for any size of the trigonal nanodisk. We also discuss a second class of nanostructures, bow-tie-shaped systems, where the zero-energy states are not protected.