Zhang et al. [Phys. Rev. B 77, 241402(R) (2008)] reported a theoretical study of the optical spectra of monolayer graphene employing the Kubo formula within a tight-binding model. Their calculations predicted that at high frequencies the optical conductivity of graphene becomes strongly anisotropic. In particular, at frequencies comparable to the energy separation of the upper and lower bands at the $\mathrm{\Gamma }$ point, the optical conductivity is strongly suppressed if the field polarization is along the zigzag direction whereas it is significantly high for the armchair one. We find that, unfortunately, this result is just a consequence of the incorrect determination of the current operator in $k$ space. Here, we present a standard scheme to obtain this operator correctly. As a result, we show that the optical conductivity of monolayer graphene is indeed isotropic, which is consistent with the results of other (both theoretical and experimental) studies in the literature.

• Received 31 May 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.117401

Condensed Matter & Materials Physics

Source: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.117401