A Family of Finite-Temperature Electronic Phase Transitions in Graphene Multilayers

Abstract: Suspended Bernal-stacked graphene multilayers up to an unexpectedly large thickness exhibit a broken-symmetry ground state, whose origin remains to be understood. Here we show that a finite-temperature second order phase transition occurs in multilayers whose critical temperature Tc increases from 12 K in bilayers to 100 K in heptalayers. A comparison of the data to a phenomenological model inspired by a mean field approach suggests that the transition is associated with the appearance of a self-consistent valley- and spin-dependent staggered potential changing sign from one layer to the next, appearing at Tc and increasing upon cooling. The systematic evolution with thickness of several measured quantities imposes constraints on any microscopic theory aiming to analyze the nature of electronic correlations in this system.