Hydrogen-induced magnetism in graphene: a simple effective model description

Abstract: Hydrogen adatoms induced magnetic moment on graphene has been observed in atomic scale in a recent experiment [Gonzalez-Herrero et al., Science 352, 437 (2016)]. Here, we demonstrate that all the experimental phenomena can be simply and well described by an equivalent Anderson impurity model, where the electronic correlations on both carbon and hydrogen atoms are represented by an effective on-site Coulomb interaction on hydrogen adatom $U_H$. This simple equivalent model works so well is because that the main effect of Coulomb interaction on both carbon and hydrogen atoms is just to split the impurity resonance states with different spin. This effective Anderson impurity model can also well reproduce all the behaviours of hydrogen dimer on graphene observed in experiment. We thus argue that it should be a general model to describe the hydrogen adatoms on graphene with various adsorption configurations, especially for their magnetic properties.