The Physics of Graphene 2nd Edition

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A squalid state theorist Misha "Adam Zad" Katsnelson

r
Over and over the story, ending as he began:—
"There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!"

Rudyard Kipling
1898
ADAM ZAD
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108471640
DOI: 10.1017/9781108617567
© Cambridge University Press 2020
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
Second Edition, First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-108-47164-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
In memory of my teacher Serghey Vonsovsky and my friend Sasha Trefilov
 Contents

Preface to the second edition page ix

Preface to the first edition xi
1 The electronic structure of ideal graphene 1
2 Electron states in a magnetic field 24
3 Quantum transport via evanescent waves 63
4 The Klein paradox and chiral tunneling 77
5 Edges, nanoribbons, and quantum dots 108
6 Point defects 141
7 Optics and response functions 168
8 The Coulomb problem 193
9 Crystal lattice dynamics, structure, and thermodynamics 213
10 Gauge fields and strain engineering 257
11 Scattering mechanisms and transport properties 279
12 Spin effects and magnetism 326
13 Graphene on hexagonal boron nitride 351
14 Twisted bilayer graphene 379
15 Many-body effects in graphene 389
References 401
Index 421

vii
 Preface to the second edition

First of all, I still agree with everything that I wrote in the preface to the first
edition; however, I probably need to add a few words on the differences between
the second edition and the first.
As you can see, I have changed the title. In 2011 when I finished Graphene:
Carbon in Two Dimensions, there were no other books on graphene, and the
accuracy of the title was probably not so important. I would also like to emphasize
what is special about this book and in what respect it is different from the many
others that have appeared in the market in the meantime. To my knowledge, this is
the only book on graphene (yet) that focuses completely on fundamental issues of
physics and completely ignores all aspects of fabrication, devices, applications,
chemistry, etc. Hopefully, the new title, The Physics of Graphene, stresses this
point clearly enough and helps potential readers to avoid any disappointment if
they do not find something in the book which, in their mind, should be in a book on
graphene. Of course, I do not mean that these aspects are not important; I just
believe that I am not the proper person to write about them and that other people
can do that much better.
In the field of graphene, eight years is a very long period of time, when many
things have happened. To my surprise, when I started to work on the new edition,
I did not find anything that should be eliminated from the book because it turned
out to be fundamentally wrong or irrelevant for further development. Of course,
there were some inaccuracies and mistakes, which hopefully have been fixed now,
but even so, I think all old issues remain interesting and important. At the same
time, many new concepts and facts have appeared that should be reflected in the
new book. Therefore I have added three new chapters: Chapters 13 and 14
introduce the basic physics of an important new concept, van der Waals hetero-
structures, and Chapter 15 gives a very brief summary of our progress in under-
standing many-body effects in graphene. Eight years ago we had the feeling that a
single-particle picture of noninteracting Dirac fermions explained everything; this

ix
x Preface to the second edition

is no longer the case. Huge progress in the quality of graphene samples has opened
a way to essentially observe many-body features of the electronic spectrum near
the neutrality point.
My work on these subjects was essentially based on a collaboration with Nikita
Astrakhantsev, Viktor Braguta, Annalisa Fasolino, Andre Geim, Yura Gornos-
tyrev, Sasha Lichtenstein, Kostya Novoselov, Marco Polini, Burkhard Sachs, Guus
Slotman, Misha Titov, Maksim Ulybyshev, Merel van Wijk, Tim Wehling, and
Shengjun Yuan. Many thanks!
New material has also been added to the old chapters. The most important new
points are:
(1) We now understand the physics and mathematics of chiral tunneling in single-
and bilayer graphene much better, therefore Chapter 4 has been expanded.
These new results were obtained in collaboration with many people, and
I especially thank Koen Reijnders and Victor Kleptsyn.
(2) I have added a new section to Chapter 5 on a spectral flow of Dirac operator in
multiconnected graphene flakes. Topological aspects of condensed matter
physics have become really hot of late, and this provides a nice and fresh
new example. This piece is based on our work with Vladimir Nazaikinskii, to
whom I also give thanks.
(3) Chapter 9 was essentially rewritten. I have added new material on mechanical
properties, which is based on our work with Jan Los and Annalisa Fasolino,
and on thermal expansion of graphene. I thank Igor Burmistrov, Igor Gornyi,
Paco Guinea, Valentin Kachorovskii, and Sasha Mirlin for collaboration and
useful discussions of this subtle issue. I also thank Achille Mauri who found
some inaccuracies in the old Chapter 9 and helped to fix them.
(4) In Chapter 11, I have added a discussion of edge scattering, which is based on
our work with Vitaly Dugaev, to whom I am very thankful for his collabor-
ation. Hydrodynamics of electronic liquid in graphene is a very fresh and
popular subject now, and I cannot avoid it. When I wrote this part, discussions
with Misha Titov and Marco Polini were very helpful.
(5) We now know much more about magnetism and spin-orbit effects in graphene
and related two-dimensional materials, therefore Chapter 12 has also been
updated. The common work with Andre Geim, Irina Grigorieva, Sasha Lich-
tenstein, Vladimir Mazurenko, and Sasha Rudenko provided essential insights
on my new understanding of the subject.
I would like to repeat all of my acknowledgments from the preface to the first
edition. Without all of these old and new collaborations and, of course, without full
support from my wife Marina, this book would be impossible.
 Preface to the first edition

I do not think that I need to explain, in the preface to a book that is all about
graphene, what graphene is and why it is important. After the Nobel Prize for
physics in 2010, everybody should have heard something about graphene. I do
need, however, to explain why I wrote this book and what is special about it.
I hope it will not be considered a disclosure of insider information if I tell you
that Andre Geim is a bit sarcastic (especially with theoreticians). Every time
I mentioned that I was somewhat busy writing a book on graphene, he always
replied “Go to Amazon.com and search for ‘graphene’.” Indeed, there are many
books on graphene, many more reviews, and infinitely many collections of papers
and conference proceedings (well, not really infinitely many . . . in the main text
I will use the mathematical terminology in a more rigorous way, I promise). Why,
nevertheless, has this book been written and why may it be worthwhile for you to
read it?
Of course, this is a personal view of the field. I do love it, and it has been my
main scientific activity during the last seven years, from 2004 when graphene
started to be the subject of intensive and systematic investigations. Luckily, I was
involved in this development almost from the very beginning. It was a fantastic
experience to watch a whole new world coming into being and to participate in the
development of a new language for this new world. I would like to try to share this
experience with the readers of this book.
The beauty of graphene is that it demonstrates in the most straightforward way
many basic concepts of fundamental physics, from Berry’s phase and topologically
protected zero modes, to strongly interacting fluctuations and scaling laws for two-
dimensional systems. It is also a real test bed for relativistic quantum phenomena
such as Klein tunneling or vacuum reconstruction – “CERN on one’s desk.” I was
not able to find a book that focused on these aspects of graphene, namely on its role
in our general physical view of the world. I have tried to write such a book myself.
The price is that I have sacrificed all practical aspects of graphene science and

xi
xii Preface to the first edition

technology, so you will not find a single word here about the ways in which
graphene is produced, and there is hardly anything about its potential applications.
Well, there is a lot of literature on these subjects. Also, I have said very little about
the chemistry of graphene, which is an extremely interesting subject in itself. It
certainly deserves a separate book, and I am not chemist enough to write it.
The field is very young, and it is not easy to know what will not be out of date in
just a couple of years. My choice is clear from the contents of this book. I do
believe that it represents the core of graphene physics, which will not be essentially
modified in the near future. I do not mean that this is the most interesting part;
moreover, I am sure that there will be impressive progress, at least, in two more
directions that are hardly mentioned in the book: in the many-body physics of
graphene and in our understanding of electron transport near the neutrality point,
where the semiclassical Boltzmann equation is obviously inapplicable. I think,
however, that it is a bit too early to cover these subjects in a book, since too many
things are not yet clear. Also, the mathematical tools required are not as easy as
those used in this book, and I think it is unfair to force the reader to learn
something technically quite complicated without a deep internal confidence that
the results are relevant for the real graphene.
The way the book has been written is how I would teach a course with the title
“Introduction to the Theory of Graphene.” I have tried to make a presentation that
is reasonably independent of other textbooks. I have therefore included some general
issues such as Berry’s phase, the statistical mechanics of fluctuating membranes, a
quick overview of itinerant-electron magnetism, a brief discussion of basic none-
quilibrium statistical mechanics, etc. The aims were, first, to show the physics of
graphene in a more general context and, second, to make the reading easier.
It is very difficult to give an overview of a field that has developed so quickly as
has that of graphene. So many papers appear, literally every day, that keeping
permanently up to date would be an enterprise in the style of ancient myths, e.g.,
those of Sisyphus, the Danaïdes, and some of the labors of Hercules. I apologize
therefore for the lack of many important references. I tried to do my best.
I cannot even list all of the scientific reviews on the basic physics of graphene
that are available now (let alone reviews of applications and of popular literature).
Let me mention at least several of them, in chronological order: Katsnelson
(2007a), Geim and Novoselov (2007), Beenakker (2008), Castro Neto et al.
(2009), Geim (2009), Abergel et al. (2010), Vozmediano, Katsnelson, and Guinea
(2010), Peres (2010), Das Sarma et al. (2011), Goerbig (2011), and Kotov et al.
(2012). There you can find different, complementary views on the field (with the
possible exception of the first one). Of course, the Nobel lectures by Geim (2011)
and Novoselov (2011) are especially strongly recommended. In particular, the
lecture by Andre Geim contains a brilliant presentation of the prehistory and
 Preface to the first edition xiii

history of graphene research, so I do not need to discuss these unavoidably

controversial issues in my book.
I am very grateful to Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, who involved me in
this wonderful field before it became fashionable (otherwise I would probably
never have dared to join such a brilliant company). I am especially grateful to
Andre for regular and lengthy telephone conversations; when you have to discuss a
theory using just words, without formulas and diagrams, and cannot even make
faces, after several years it does improve your understanding of theoretical physics.
It is impossible to thank all my other collaborators in the field of graphene in a
short preface, as well as other colleagues with whom I have had fruitful discussions.
I have to thank, first of all, Annalisa Fasolino, Paco Guinea, Sasha Lichtenstein, and
Tim Wehling for especially close and intensive collaboration. I am very grateful to
the former and current members of our group in Nijmegen working on graphene:
Misha Akhukov, Danil Boukhvalov, Jan Los, Koen Reijnders, Rafa Roldan, Timur
Tudorovskiy, Shengjun Yuan, and Kostya Zakharchenko, and to my other collabor-
ators and coauthors, especially Mark Auslender, Eduardo Castro, Hans De Raedt,
Olle Eriksson, Misha Fogler, Jos Giesbers, Leonya Levitov, Tony Low, Jan Kees
Maan, Hector Ochoa, Marco Polini, Sasha Rudenko, Mark van Schilfgaarde, Andrey
Shytov, Alyosha Tsvelik, Maria Vozmediano, Oleg Yazyev, and Uli Zeitler.
I am grateful to the Faculty of Science of Radboud University and the Institute
for Molecules and Materials for making available to me the time and resources for
research and writing.
I am very grateful to Marina Katsnelson and Timur Tudorovskiy for their
invaluable help with the preparation of the manuscript and for their critical reading.
I am grateful to many colleagues for permission to reproduce figures from their papers
and for providing some of the original figures used in the book. I am especially
grateful to Annalisa Fasolino for the wonderful picture that is used on the cover.
Of course, the role of my wife Marina in this book amounts to much more than
her help with the manuscript. You cannot succeed in such a long and demanding
task without support from your family. I am very grateful for her understanding
and full support.
The book is dedicated to the memory of two people who were very close to me,
my teacher Serghey Vonsovsky (1910–1998) and my friend Sasha Trefilov
(1951–2003). I worked with them for about 20 years, and they had a decisive
influence on the formation of my scientific taste and my scientific style. I thought
many times during these last seven years how sad it is that I cannot discuss some of
the new and interesting physics about graphene with them. Also, in a more
technical sense, I would not have been able to write this book without the experi-
ence of writing my previous books, Vonsovsky and Katsnelson (1989) and
Katsnelson and Trefilov (2002).
 1
The electronic structure of ideal graphene

1.1 The carbon atom

Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table. It has two stable isotopes,
12
C (98.9% of natural carbon) with nuclear spin I = 0 and, thus, nuclear magnetic
moment μn = 0, and 13C (1.1% of natural carbon) with I = ½ and μn = 0.7024μN
(μN is the nuclear magneton); see Radzig and Smirnov (1985). Like most of the
chemical elements, it originates from nucleosynthesis in stars (for a review, see the
Nobel lecture by Fowler [1984]). Actually, it plays a crucial role in the chemical
evolution of the universe.
The stars of the first generation produced energy only by proton–proton chain
reaction, which results in the synthesis of one α-particle (nucleus 4He) from four
protons, p. Further nuclear fusion reactions might lead to the formation of either of
the isotopes 5He and 5Li (p + α collisions) or of 8Be (α + α collisions); however,
all these nuclei are very unstable. As was first realized by F. Hoyle, the chemical
evolution does not stop at helium only due to a lucky coincidence
the nucleus
12
C has an energy level close enough to the energy of three α-particles, thus, the
triple fusion reaction 3α ! 12C, being resonant, has a high enough probability.
This opens up a way to overcome the mass gap (the absence of stable isotopes with
masses 5 and 8) and provides the prerequisites for nucleosynthesis up to the most
stable nucleus, 56Fe; heavier elements are synthesized in supernova explosions.
The reaction 3α ! 12C is the main source of energy for red giants. Carbon also
plays an essential role in nuclear reactions in stars of the main sequence (heavier
than the Sun) via the so-called CNO cycle.
The carbon atom has six electrons, two of them forming a closed 1s2 shell
(helium shell) and four filling 2s and 2p states. The ground-state atomic configur-
ation is 2s2 2p2, with the total spin S = 1, total orbital moment L = 1 and total
angular moment J = 0 (the ground-state multiplet 3P0). The first excited state, with
a J = 1, 3P1 multiplet, has the energy 16.4 cm
1  2 meV (Radzig & Smirnov,

1
2 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

1985), which gives an estimate of the strength of the spin-orbit coupling in the
carbon atom. The lowest-energy state with configuration 2s1 2p3 has the energy
33,735.2 cm
1  4.2 eV (Radzig & Smirnov, 1985), so this is the promotion
energy for exciting a 2s electron into a 2p state. At first sight, this would mean that
carbon should always be divalent, due to there being two 2p electrons while the
2s electrons are chemically quite inert. This conclusion is, however, wrong.
Normally, carbon is tetravalent, due to a formation of hybridized sp electron
states, according to the concept of “resonance” developed by L. Pauling (Pauling,
1960; see also Eyring, Walter, & Kimball, 1946).
When atoms form molecules or solids, the total energy decreases due to overlap
of the electron wave functions at various sites and formation of molecular orbitals
(in molecules) or energy bands (in solids); for a compact introduction to chemical
bonding in solids, see section 1.7 in Vonsovsky and Katsnelson (1989). This
energy gain can be sufficient to provide the energy that is necessary to promote
a 2s electron into a 2p state in the carbon atom.
In order to maximize the energy gained during the formation of a covalent bond,
the overlap of the wave functions with those at neighboring atoms should also be
maximal. This is possible if the neighboring atoms are situated in such directions
from the central atoms that the atomic wave functions take on maximum values.
The larger these values are, the stronger the bond is. There are four basis functions
corresponding to the spherical harmonics
1
Y 0, 0 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffi ,
4π
rffiffiffiffiffi
3
Y 1, 0 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ i cos ϑ, (1.1)
4π
rffiffiffiffiffi
3
Y 1, 1 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ i sin ϑ exp ðiφÞ,
8π
where ϑ and φ are polar angles. Rather than take the functions Yl, m(ϑ, φ) to be the
basis functions, it is more convenient to choose their orthonormalized linear
combinations of the form
rffiffiffiffiffi
i 3
pffiffiffi ½Y 1, 1 ðϑ; φÞ
Y 1,
1 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ sin ϑ cos φ,
2 4π
rffiffiffiffiffi
i 3
pffiffiffi ½Y 1, 1 ðϑ; φÞ þ Y 1,
1 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ sin ϑ sin φ, (1.2)
2 4π
rffiffiffiffiffi
3

iY 1, 0 ðϑ; φÞ ¼ cos ϑ,
4π
 1.1 The carbon atom 3

which are transformed under rotations as the Cartesian coordinates x, y, and z,

respectively. The radial components of the s and p functions in the simplest
approximation are supposed to be equal in magnitude (which is of course a p very
ffiffiffiffiffi
strong assumption) and may be omitted, together with the constant factor 1= 4π
which is not important here. Then the angular dependence of the four basis
functions that we will introduce in lieu of Y1,m(ϑ, φ) can be represented as
jsi ¼ 1,
pffiffiffi pffiffiffi pffiffiffi (1.3)
jxi ¼ 3 sin ϑ cos φ, jyi ¼ 3 sin ϑ sin φ, jzi ¼ 3 cos ϑ:
We now seek linear combinations of the functions (1.3) that will ensure maximum
overlap with the functions of the adjacent atoms. This requires that the value
of α ¼ max ψ be a maximum. With the normalization that we have chosen,
ϑ, φ
pffiffiffi
α = 1 for the s states and α ¼ 3 for the p functions of jxi, jyi, and jzi. We then
represent the function jψi as
jψ i ¼ ajsi þ b1 jxi þ b2 jyi þ b3 jzi, (1.4)
where a and bi are real-valued coefficients that satisfy the normalization condition

a2 þ b21 þ b22 þ b23 ¼ 1: (1.5)

The function jψi, then, is normalized in the same way as (1.3). This follows from
their mutual orthogonality
ð
dojψ ðϑ; φÞj2  hψjψ i ¼ a2 hsjsi þ b21 hxjxi þ b22 hyjyi þ b23 hzjzi ¼ 4π,

with do being an element of solid angle. For the time being, the orientation of the
axes in our case is arbitrary.
Let us assume that in one of the functions ψ for which α is a maximum, this
maximum value is reached in the direction along the diagonal of the cube (1, 1, 1),
with the carbon atom at its center and with the coordinate axes parallel to its edges
(Fig. 1.1). Then b1 = b2 = b3 = b. The (1, 1, 1) direction is given by angles ϑ and φ
such that
rffiffiffi
1 1 2
sin φ ¼ cos φ ¼ pffiffiffi , cos ϑ ¼ pffiffiffi , sin ϑ ¼ ,
2 3 3
so that
jxi = jyi = jzi = 1.
In addition,
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
α ¼ a þ 3b ¼ a þ 3ð1
a2 Þ, (1.6)
4 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

Z
(–1,–1,1)
(1,1,1)

Y
X

(–1,1,–1)

(1,–1,–1)

Fig. 1.1 Directions of sp3 chemical bonds of the carbon atom.

where we have used the conditions (1.3). The maximum of α as a function of a is

reached for a ¼ 12 and is equal to 2. The quantity b in this case is equal to 12. Thus
the first orbital with maximum values along the coordinate axes that we have
chosen is of the form
1
j1i ¼ ðjsi þ jxi þ jyi þ jziÞ: (1.7)
2
It can be readily shown that the functions
1
j2i ¼ ðjsi þ jxi
jyi
jziÞ,
2
1
j3i ¼ ðjsi
jxi þ jyi
jziÞ, (1.8)
2
1
j4i ¼ ðjsi
jxi
jyi þ jziÞ
2
correspond to the same value α = 2. The functions jii (i = 1, 2, 3, 4) are mutually
orthogonal. They take on their maximum values along the (1,1, 1), (1, 1, 1), (1, 1, 1),
and (1, 1, 1) axes, i.e., along the axes of the tetrahedron, and, therefore, the
maximum gain in chemical-bonding energy corresponds to the tetrahedral environ-
ment of the carbon atom. In spite of being qualitative, the treatment that we have
performed here nevertheless explains the character of the crystal structure of the
periodic table group-IV elements (diamond-type lattice, Fig. 1.2) as well as the shape
of the methane molecule, which is very close to being tetrahedral.
The wave functions (1.7) and (1.8) correspond to a so-called sp3 state of the
carbon atom, for which all chemical bonds are equivalent. Another option is that
three sp electrons form hybrid covalent bonds, whereas one p electron has a special
destiny, being distributed throughout the whole molecule (benzene) or the whole
 1.2 π States in graphene 5

Fig. 1.2 The structure of diamond.

crystal (graphite or graphene). If one repeats the previous consideration for a

smaller basis, including only functions, jsi, jxi and, jyi one finds the following
functions corresponding to the maximum overlap (Eyring, Walter, & Kimball,
1946):
1  pffiffiffi 
j1i ¼ pffiffiffi jsi þ 2jxi ,
3
1 1 1
j2i ¼ pffiffiffi jsi
pffiffiffi jxi þ pffiffiffi jyi, (1.9)
3 6 2
1 1 1
j3i ¼ pffiffiffi jsi
pffiffiffi jxi
pffiffiffi jyi:
3 6 2
The corresponding orbits have maxima in the xy-plane separated by angles of 120 .
These are called σ bonds. The last electron with the p orbital perpendicular to the
plane (jzi function) forms a π bond. This state (sp2) is therefore characterized by
threefold coordination of carbon atoms, in contrast with fourfold coordination for
the sp3 state. This is the case of graphite (Fig. 1.3).

1.2 π States in graphene

Graphene has a honeycomb crystal lattice as shown in Fig. 1.4(a). The Bravais
lattice is triangular, with the lattice vectors
a  pffiffiffi a pffiffiffi
~
a1 ¼ 3; 3 , ~ a2 ¼ 3;
3 , (1.10)
2 2
6 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

Fig. 1.3 The structure of graphite.

(a)
(b)
ky b1

A B

Γ M kx
a1
K´

a2
b2

Fig. 1.4 (a) A honeycomb lattice: sublattices A and B are shown as black and
gray. (b) Reciprocal lattice vectors and some special points in the Brillouin zone.

∘
where a  1:42 A is the nearest-neighbor distance. It corresponds to a so-
called conjugated carbon–carbon bond (like in benzene) intermediate between a
∘ ∘
single bond and a double bond, with lengths r1  1:54 A and r2  1:31 A ,
respectively.
The honeycomb lattice contains two atoms per elementary cell. They belong to
two sublattices, A and B, each atom from sublattice A being surrounded by three
atoms from sublattice B, and vice versa (a bipartite lattice). The nearest-neighbor
vectors are
a  pffiffiffi ~ a pffiffiffi
~δ1 ¼ 1; 3 , δ2 ¼ 1;
3 , ~ δ3 ¼ að
1; 0Þ: (1.11)
2 2
 1.2 π States in graphene 7

Fig. 1.5 The band structure of graphene.

(Reproduced with permission from Boukhvalov, Katsnelson, & Lichtenstein, 2008.)

The reciprocal lattice is also triangular, with the lattice vectors

2π  pffiffiffi ~ 2π  pffiffiffi
~
b1 ¼ 1; 3 , b2 ¼ 1;
3 : (1.12)
3a 3a
The Brillouin zone is presented in Fig. 1.4(b). Special high-symmetry points K, K0 ,
and M are shown there, with the wave vectors
     
2π 2π ~ 2π 2π ~ 2π
~
K ¼0
; p ffiffi
ffi ; K¼ ;
p ffiffi
ffi , M¼ ;0 : (1.13)
3a 3 3a 3a 3 3a 3a
The electronic structures of graphene and graphite are discussed in detail in
Bassani and Pastori Parravicini (1975). In Fig. 1.5 we show a recent computational
result for graphene. The sp2 hybridized states (σ states) form occupied and
empty bands with a huge gap, whereas pz (π) states form a single band, with a
conical self-crossing point in K (the same point, by symmetry, exists also in K0 ).
This conical point is a characteristic of the peculiar electronic structure of graphene
and the origin of its unique electronic properties. It was first obtained by Wallace
(1947) in the framework of a simple tight-binding model. Furthermore this model
was developed by McClure (1957) and Slonczewski and Weiss (1958).
Let us start, following Wallace (1947), with the nearest-neighbor approximation
for the π states only, with the hopping parameter t. The basis of electron states
contains two π states belonging to the atoms from sublattices A and B. In the
nearest-neighbor approximation, there are no hopping processes within the sub-
lattices; hopping occurs only between them. The tight-binding Hamiltonian is
therefore described by the 2 2 matrix
8 The electronic structure of ideal graphene
0  1
  0 tS ~
k
^ ~
H k ¼@   A, (1.14)
tS∗ ~k 0

where ~
k is the wave vector and
  X    pffiffiffi
~ k~
i~δ ikx a ky a 3
S k ¼ e ¼ 2 exp cos þ exp ð
ikx aÞ: (1.15)
~
2 2
δ

The energy is, therefore,

     rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
 ffi
 ~ 
E k ¼ t S k  ¼ t 3 þ f ~
~ k , (1.16)

where
  pffiffiffi  pffiffiffi   
~ 3 3
f k ¼ 2 cos 3ky a þ 4 cos ky a cos kx a : (1.17)
2 2
  0
One can see immediately that S K~ ¼S K ~ ¼ 0, which means band crossing. On
expanding the Hamiltonian near these points one finds
0  1
3at @ 0 α qx þ iqy
^ K 0 ð~
H qÞ    A
2 α∗ qx
iqy 0
0  1
3at @ 0 α qx
iqy
^ K ð~
H qÞ    A (1.18)
2 α∗ qx þ iqy 0

q ¼~
where α = e5iπ/6, with ~ k
K ~ and~
k
K ~0 respectively. The phase 5π/6 can be
excluded by a unitary transformation of the basis functions. Thus, the effective
Hamiltonians near the points K and K0 take the form
 
^ K , K 0 ð~ 0 qx  iqy
H qÞ ¼ ℏv , (1.19)
qx  iqy 0

where
3ajt j
v¼ (1.20)
2ℏ
is the electron velocity at the conical points. The possible negative sign of t can be
excluded by an additional phase shift by π.
 1.2 π States in graphene 9

On taking into account the next-nearest-neighbor hopping t0 , one finds, instead

of Eq. (1.16),
       rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
 ffi  
 ~ 
E k ¼ tS k  þ t f k ¼ t 3 þ f ~
~ 0 ~
k þ t0 f ~
k : (1.21)

The second term breaks the electron–hole symmetry, shifting the conical point
from E = 0 to E =
3t0 , but it does not change the behavior of the Hamiltonian
near the conical points. Actually, this behavior is symmetry-protected (and even
topologically protected), as we will see in the next section.
Note that, contrary to the sign of t, the sign of t0 describing the hopping within
the same sublattice cannot be changed by unitary transformation.
The points K and
K0 differ by the reciprocal lattice vector ~ b ¼~ b1
~
b2 , so the
0
point K is equivalent to
K. To show this explicitly, it is sometimes convenient to
use a larger unit cell in the reciprocal space, with six conical points. The spectrum
(1.16) in this representation is shown in Fig. 1.6.
The parameters of the effective tight-binding model can be found by fitting
the results of first-principles electronic-structure calculations. According to Reich
et al. (2002), the first three hopping parameters are t =
2.97 eV, t0 =
0.073 eV
and t00 =
0.33 eV. Experimental estimates (Kretinin et al., 2013) yield t0 
0.3
eV 15%. The smallness of t0 in comparison with t means that the electron–hole
symmetry of the spectrum is quite accurate not only in the vicinity of the conical
points but also throughout the whole Brillouin zone.
There are saddle points of the electron energy spectrum at M (see Figs. 1.5
and 1.6), with Van Hove singularities in the electron density of states,
δN(E) /
ln j E
EMj (Bassani & Pastori Parravicini, 1975). The positions of
these singularities with the parameters from Reich et al. (2002) are
EM
= t + t0
3t00 
2.05eV

Fig. 1.6 The electron energy spectrum of graphene in the nearest-neighbor

approximation.
10 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

and
EM+ =
t + t 0 + 3t 00  1.91eV.

The Hamiltonian (1.14) in the representation (1.15) has an obvious trigonal

symmetry (a symmetry with respect to rotation at 120 ). At the same time, it is
not periodic in the reciprocal space, which may be inconvenient for some calcula-
tions (of course, its eigenvalues (1.16) are periodic). This can be fixed by the
change of basis, e.g., by multiplying the A-component of the wave function by a
factor exp ð
i~k~δ3 Þ. Then, instead of Eq. (1.15) we will have the expression
⇀ ~~ ~ ~~ ~
Sðk Þ ¼ 1 þ eikðδ1
δ3 Þ þ eikðδ2
δ3 Þ ,

which is obviously periodic but its trigonal symmetry is now hidden. The use of
the representation is dictated by convenience for a specific problem.

1.3 Massless Dirac fermions in graphene

Undoped graphene has a Fermi energy coinciding with the energy at the conical
points, with a completely filled valence band, an empty conduction band, and no
band gap in between. This means that, from the point of view of a general band
theory, graphene is an example of a gapless semiconductor (Tsidilkovskii, 1996).
Three-dimensional crystals, such as HgTe and α-Sn (gray tin) are known to be
gapless semiconductors. What makes graphene unique is not the gapless state itself
but the very special, chiral nature of the electron states, as well as the high degree
of electron–hole symmetry.
For any realistic doping, the Fermi energy is close to the energy at the conical
point, jEF j « j tj. To construct an effective model describing electron and hole
states in this regime one needs to expand the effective Hamiltonian near one of the
special points K and K0 and then make the replacements
∂ ∂
qx !
i , qy !
i ,
∂x ∂y
which corresponds to the effective mass approximation, or ~ k~p perturbation
theory (Tsidilkovskii, 1982; Vonsovsky & Katsnelson, 1989). From Eq. (1.19),
one has
H^ K ¼
iℏv~
σ r, (1.22)
^ K0 ¼ H
H ^ TK , (1.23)
where
       
1 0 0 1 0
i 1 0
σ0 ¼ , σx ¼ , σy ¼ , σz ¼ (1.24)
0 1 1 0 i 0 0
1
 1.3 Massless Dirac fermions in graphene 11

are Pauli matrices (only x- and y-components enter Eq. (1.22)) and T denotes a
transposed matrix. A complete low-energy Hamiltonian consists of 4 4 matrices
taking into account both two sublattices and two conical points (in terms of
semiconductor physics, two valleys).
In the basis
0 1
ψ KA
B ψ KB C
Ψ¼B C
@ ψ K 0 A A, (1.25)
ψK0B
where ψKA means a component of the electron wave function corresponding to
valley K and sublattice A, the Hamiltonian is a 2 2 block supermatrix
 
^K
H 0
^
H¼
0 H ^ K0 : (1.26)

Sometimes it is more convenient to choose the basis as

0 1
ψ KA
B ψ KB C
Ψ¼B @ ψ K0 B A
C (1.27)

ψ K0 A
(Aleiner & Efetov, 2006; Akhmerov & Beenakker, 2008; Basko, 2008), then the
Hamiltonian (1.26) takes the most symmetric form
^ ¼
iℏvτ0 ⊗~
H σ r, (1.28)
where τ0 is the unit matrix in valley indices (we will use different notations for the
same Pauli matrices acting on different indices, namely, ~ σ in the sublattice space
and ~τ in the valley space).
For the case of an ideal graphene, the valleys are decoupled. If we add some
inhomogeneities (external electric and magnetic fields, disorder, etc.) that are smooth
at the atomic scale, the valleys remain independent, since the Fourier component of
external potential with the Umklapp wave vector ~ b is very small, and intervalley
scattering is improbable. We will deal mainly with this case. However, one should
keep in mind that any sharp (atomic-scale) inhomogeneities, e.g., boundaries or
vacancies, will mix the states from different valleys, see Chapters 5 and 6.
The Hamiltonian (1.22) is a two-dimensional analog of the Dirac Hamiltonian
for massless fermions (Bjorken & Drell, 1964; Berestetskii, Lifshitz, & Pitaevskii,
1971; Davydov, 1976). Instead of the velocity of light c, there is a parameter
v  106 ms
1  c/300 (we will discuss later, in Chapter 2, how this parameter has
been found experimentally).
12 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

A formal similarity between ultrarelativistic particles (with energy much larger

than the rest energy mc2, such that one can consider the particles as massless) and
electrons in graphene makes graphene a playground on which to study various
quantum relativistic effects
“CERN on one’s desk.” These relationships between
the physics of graphene and relativistic quantum mechanics will be considered in
the next several chapters.
The internal degree of freedom, which is just spin for “true” Dirac fermions, is
the sublattice index in the case of graphene. The Dirac “spinors” consist here of the
components describing the distribution of electrons in sublattices A and B. We will
call this quantum number pseudospin, so that pseudospin “up” means sublattice
A and pseudospin “down” means sublattice B. Apart from the pseudospin, there
are two more internal degrees of freedom, namely the valley label (sometimes
called isospin) and real spin. So the most general low-energy Hamiltonian of
electrons in graphene is an 8 8 matrix.
Spin-orbit coupling leads to a mixture of pseudospin and real spin and to the gap
opening (Kane & Mele, 2005b). However, the value of the gap is supposed to be
very small, of the order of 10
2 K for pristine graphene (Huertas-Hernando,
Guinea, & Brataas, 2006). The reason is not only the lightness of carbon atoms
but also the orientation of orbital moments for pz states perpendicular to the
graphene plane. In silicene and germanene, that is, Si and Ge analogs of graphene,
the structure is buckled, which leads to a dramatic enhancement of the spin-orbit
coupling (Acun et al., 2015). Defects can significantly enhance the spin-orbit
coupling (Castro Neto & Guinea, 2009) and the corresponding effects are relevant,
e.g., for spin relaxation in graphene (Huertas-Hernando, Guinea, & Brataas, 2009),
but the influence of spin-orbit coupling on the electronic structure is negligible.
Henceforth we will neglect these effects, until the end of the book (see Section
12.4).
For the case of “true” Dirac fermions in three-dimensional space, the
Hamiltonian is a 4 4 matrix, due to two projections of spins and two values of
a charge degree of freedom – particle versus antiparticle. For the two-dimensional
case the latter is not independent of the former. Electrons and holes are just linear
combinations of the states from the sublattices A and B. The 2 2 matrix ℏv~ σ~k
(the result of action of the Hamiltonian (1.22) on a plane wave with wave vector ~ k)
is diagonalized by the unitary transformation

^ ~ ¼ p1ffiffiffi 1 þ i~
U m~k~
σ , (1.29)
k
2
  
~~k ¼ sin ϕ~k ;
cos ϕ~k , and ϕ~k is the polar angle of the vector ~
where m k m~~k ⊥~
k .
The eigenfunctions
 1.3 Massless Dirac fermions in graphene 13
 !
  1 exp
iϕ~k =2
ðKÞ
ψ e, h ~
k ¼ pffiffiffi  (1.30)
2  exp iϕ~k =2

correspond to electron (e) and hole (h) states, with the energies

Ee, h =  ℏvk. (1.31)

For the valley K0 the corresponding states (in the basis (1.25)) are
 !
0
  1 exp iϕ~ =2
ψ e, h ~
ðK Þ k
k ¼ pffiffiffi  : (1.32)
2  exp
iϕ~k =2

Of course, this choice of the wave functions is not unique, they can be multiplied
by an arbitrary phase factor; only the ratio of the components of the spinor
corresponding to the sublattices A and B has a physical meaning.
For the electron (hole) states, by definition
 
~ σ
k~
ψ e,h ¼ ψ e,h : (1.33)
k
This means that the electrons (holes) in graphene have a definite pseudospin
direction, namely parallel (antiparallel) to the direction of motion. Thus, these
states are chiral (helical), as should be the case for massless Dirac fermions
(Bjorken & Drell, 1964). This is of crucial importance for “relativistic” effects,
such as Klein tunneling, which will be considered in Chapter 4.
The Dirac model for electrons in graphene results from the lowest-order expan-
sion of the tight-binding Hamiltonian (1.14) near the conical points. If one takes
into account the next, quadratic, term, one finds, instead of the Hamiltonian (1.28)
(in the basis (1.27))
h  i
^ ¼ ℏvτ0 ⊗~
H σ~
k þ μτz ⊗ 2σ y kx k y
σ x k 2x
k2y , (1.34)

where μ = 3a2t/8. The additional term in Eq. (1.34) corresponds to a trigonal

warping (Ando, Nakanishi, & Saito, 1998; McCann et al., 2006). Diagonalization
   
of the Hamiltonian (1.34) gives the spectrum Ee, h ~
k ¼ ε ~
k , where
  
ε ~
2
k ¼ ℏ2 v2 k2  2ℏvμk3 cos 3ϕ~k þ μ2 k 4 , (1.35)

with the signs ∓ corresponding to valleys K and K0 . The dispersion law is no longer
   
isotropic but has threefold (trigonal) symmetry. Importantly, ε ~ k 6¼ ε
~ k ,
14 The electronic structure of ideal graphene

which means that the trigonal warping destroys an effective time-reversal sym-
   
metry for a given valley (the property E ~
k ¼ E
~ k follows from the time-
reversal symmetry [Vonsovsky & Katsnelson, 1989]). Of course, for the electron
spectrum as a whole, taking into account the two valleys, the symmetry holds:
   
~ ~ ~
ε k þ K ¼ ε
k
K : ~ (1.36)

At the end of this section we show, following Mañes, Guinea, and Vozmediano
(2007), that the gapless state with the conical point is symmetry-protected. The
proof is very simple and based on consideration of two symmetry operations: time
reversal T and inversion I. We will use the basis (1.25) and the extended-Brillouin-
zone representation of Fig. 1.6 assuming K ~0 ¼
K:~ The time reversal changes the
sign of the wave vector, or valley,
Tψ KðA;BÞ ¼ ψ ∗
KðA;BÞ ¼ ψ K0 ðA;BÞ , (1.37)

whereas the inversion also exchanges the sublattices:

IψKA = ψK0B, IψKB = ψK0A. (1.38)

^K
Invariance under these symmetries imposes the following conditions for H
^
and H K0 :

T : HK = H∗K0 = HK, (1.39)

I : HK = σxHK0 σx = HK. (1.40)

Indeed,
   
a11 a12 a22 a21
σx σ ¼ , (1.41)
a21 a22 x a12 a11

so the operation in (1.40) does exchange the A and B sublattices.

The conditions (1.39) and (1.40) establish relations between the Hamiltonians
for the different valleys. If we use both these symmetry transformations we impose
restrictions on HK and HK0 separately, e.g.,
TI : H K ¼ σ x H ∗
K σx ¼ HK: (1.42)
If we write the Hamiltonian as
X
HK ¼ αi σ i
i
Another random document with
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 It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast
away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my
descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to
London, no one had compassion on me—a child of singular
abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally
—to suggest that something might have been spared, as
certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.
Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My
father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have
been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at
a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge.

Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long
repression, uttered so judicially.
And again:

I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly

did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance
whatever—the making of my clothes, I think, excepted—from
Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no
encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I
can call to mind, so help me God!

Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection,
his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms through
malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob Fagin.
Dickens writes of this time:

Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad

attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that
they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the
counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled
empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them
to my side half the day. I got better and quite easy towards
evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not
 like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his
protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and
after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob
Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the
steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side,
making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality, in
case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and
asked, when the woman opened it, was that Mr. Robert Fagin’s
house?

O caeca pectora! Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to

a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that
name of Fagin—how he could have used it as he did—in Oliver
Twist.
But I end by repeating my question—Is it any wonder that this
street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a
new world, to redress the balance of his old?
Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a
fortnight hence.
 DICKENS (IV)

PREFACE
I THINK it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day,
a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in
general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed
you.
Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although
he spent the most of his life teaching in other places the better
understanding of a literature—our own literature—which in his
undergraduate days had not found adequate recognition here, yet
Cambridge had been his pasture, and he carried everywhere the
mettle of that pasture: yes, and unmistakably, and although by the gay
sincerity of his nature he would win men to like him, wherever he went.
Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will
some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for
a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one
side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that fell to
his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first and second
weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one of two
amazing scenes—the other simultaneously passing here—when in
these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these
two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host
incorporate.

Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα

ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
 “Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in
season with the flowering bush.”

“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of

decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in
motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh
saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.

* * * * *
The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly
respectful Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on The Victorian
Age. Now he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great
man of our time—though he may now and then be a little too apt to
regard himself as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate,
felt himself strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the
historian of the future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear
as “the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”
Now I have been talking to you—already through three lectures—
upon the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age—its most
representative writer, perhaps—and preaching his eminence. But I
should be nervous of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may
put it so without offence, a somewhat complacent view for us to take of
an Age in which we were born—he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I,
just to happen along with the compensation of a more sanguine
temperament. He admits that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured
panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the
responsibility for making our own inevitable.” He admits that “the
twentieth century will doubtless be full of interest, and may even
develop some elements of greatness.” But as regards this country, “the
signs are that our work on a grand scale, with the whole world as our
stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well, I dare to say that such talk
from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is more than unhopeful; is
ungrateful:
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....
Would he but go back in memory to the tempus actum of August,
1914, it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier
for that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less
eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a
farther Pacific:
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language,
but I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry
of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all
known or prophetical horizons—a prairie, the scent over which was a
scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat—for one
does not ring changes on the loss of a friend—the mourning bell
strikes once and repeats itself—let me repeat some words written, the
other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:

In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion,

he turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself
as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a
valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which
so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone, the
marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive these
many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first, the
operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in some
way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that it
menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away
from the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-
fights, anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his
History of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in
the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from
the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in
Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.

It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go

from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their
shades with no thought of
So were I equall’d with them in renown
but the thought only to overtake them in service.
 * * * * *
Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think,
that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one for
the other’s wound.

I
To take up our tale—
It has already been objected against these lectures on Dickens—or
against such parts of them as the newspapers honour me by quoting—
that they treat Dickens as a genius of the first class. That term has little
meaning for me who seldom or never think—can hardly bring myself to
think—of great men in class-lists, in terms of a Tripos. (I reserve that
somewhat crude method of criticism to practise it upon those who are
going to be great men; and even so—if you will credit me—derive
scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the objection, and forestalled it
by quoting a famous saying of Tasso, and I take my stand on that: as I
take not the smallest interest in weighing Chaucer against Pope,
Shakespeare against Milton, Scott against Burns, or Dickens against
Thackeray. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens—their other
qualities apart—are grand creators, lords of literature all, by this
specific virtue; and, were there sense in challenging, with this quadriga
alone we could securely challenge any literature in any living tongue.
Note you, moreover: it is to this creative power that other artists less
creative, but great and therefore generous, instinctively pay homage:
Dryden, for instance, or Byron:

’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought!...
 (Childe Harold, iii. 6.)

Or again:

The mind can make

Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....
(The Dream, st. 1.)

Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....” We
talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself
unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries,
lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But in truth
neither Chaucer’s Prologue nor Shakespeare’s succession of women,
neither Redgauntlet nor David Copperfield, is a gallery of characters;
but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the characters
breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily and have
their natural being: while for us all great literature is a catholic hostelry,
in which we seat ourselves at the board with Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty,
Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Quickly, and
wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The Three
Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.

II
So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots—which we examined a
fortnight ago and found wanting—at once stagey and ill-knit and, at
that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which teemed
from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s death, so
inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and distinct, that
the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here, and only here, must
lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall interpose to-day a few words
upon this world of Dickens, with its atmosphere.
 For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange
as itself.
I have already noted some things of that world of his—that it was a
crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels, when
they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises to find,
with Shenstone,
The warmest welcome at an inn.
For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet of
the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country
rest and repose. But of real country, of solid growth in rest, of sport, of
gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations rooted,
corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England stood for
in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already called the
“Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as Mr.
Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.
Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are
dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer; who,
himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily wont,
with an industrial England into which the old agricultural England—
what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible from coal
—was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize on the ancient
virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and mistletoe, from
Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is left? Why, the
Handley Cross series, for which Messrs. Chapman and Hall intended
Pickwick as a stale challenge, could give Pickwick ten and a beating
from the first. As the season comes round you play cricket at Dingley
Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn the toe. But the
stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor the turnips, nor the
gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping, nor the drowsed
evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of all this side of
England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am not speaking,
you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with natural
scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to the
imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting it “like
a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in rural England
in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the week-end habit.
Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and hardships, of
the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and vapours,
wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had no sense,
having no tradition, of field life, of that neighbourliness which existed in
quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:

The summer air of this green hill

’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,
And all their hopes and all their tears
Be unknown things of other years....
So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone
The great old House of mossy stone.

Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he

thought of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may
read in Dombey and Son. He lived, moreover, to undergo the
chastening experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of
the country you may translate for yourself from the account, in Bleak
House, of the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse
than stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you conceive
Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and running
his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of The Old Squire?

I like the hunting of the hare

Better than that of the fox;
The new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks....

I leave my neighbours to their thought;

My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride....
 Nor has the world a better thing
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live, one’s own sole king
Upon one’s own sole ground.

I like the hunting of the hare;

It brings me, day by day,
The memory of old days as fair
With dead men past away.

To these, as homeward still I ply

And pass the churchyard gate
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.

I like the hunting of the hare;

New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days e’er I was born.

For a figure like that—hopelessly conservative, if you will, but

conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as we
should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or
two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really stood
for—their virtue along with their stupidity—by one touch of Jane
Austen’s wit, shall we say?—Dickens might have made some sort of a
fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country, he is a
lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an
impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once
confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all
Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to
the hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it
on record) was a scarlet geranium!
Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have
experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow
process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you
will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first—from “Sumer
is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”—positively riots in country scenes,
sounds, scents, country delights:
—all foison, all abundance,
and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called
heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose,
until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently
barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was
The Compleat Angler! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of
Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de
Coverly papers?—charming; but of the town, surely, and with
something of Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in
raison d’être? Fielding understood the country better—witness his
Squire Allworthy. But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages
exhibit—and they do—a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without
core or atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance—against
the mean streets and the Marshalsea—we must balance (if I may use
a paradoxical term) the weight of traditional vacuity.

III
But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of
his.
To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion
that gets near to definition by words in a Credo. Religious formulae I
think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use for
ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of an
Anglican parson—the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of
Cloisterham—and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of
a quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle,
Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow
just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George
Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give
them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely
neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs
all, in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands;
devourers of widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the
kindness and credulity of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they,
while far more innocent. As for sacred edifices—cathedrals, churches
—Dickens uses them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits
his convenience—a last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a
steeple suggesting to Mr. Wemmick—“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s
get married!” If Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of
any faith, I have yet to find the passage.
You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian
Movements, Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements—Wiseman’s
claim, Newman’s secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s
heresies—Darwin’s hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine,
and so on—that all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a
succession of shocks of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by,
as little observed as felt by him: simply disregarded.

IV
Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in
his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political
hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the
Commonwealth—the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of
Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with the
people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as
immutable—Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck at
what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation
he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I have to
hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which I will
nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all his works.
Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working philanthropists
—Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors pullulate in
this age—were the very devil to him. His simple formula ever was—in
an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect—“Yes, my
Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life.
Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all through your
acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the immediate
reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s most
excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in
that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily
work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need your help; and
so—and only so—will the city of God be established on earth.”

V
I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part
of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up,
before retreat, my cloak of advocatus diaboli:
(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all,
but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or
Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not
entirely unintellectual.
(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the
characters in it—until you come to Pip, say, in Great Expectations—are
all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not
afraid to back this assertion against Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, in
which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family
selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr.
Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene
Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, as the rule, these
things do not happen within them, as such things happen in the soul of
any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are
intended and traced as happening (say) in Romola. Dombey’s
conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a
prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.

VI
 Further—and to conclude on this point—over and beyond its
infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or
professional skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth.
We have spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord
Chancellor to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal
experience in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the
guilty or slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office—

Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of David Copperfield will

take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be interesting [I do
not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D. degree] to count the
number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover an accoucheur who
did not contrive to lose either the mother or the child, or both.

VII
What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought,
science?
I reserve the answer for a minute or two.
But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what
you will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he
created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist it is
the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted that, in
the preface to David Copperfield, he wrote the strict truth:

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how

sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of
 all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I had
nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which might
be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this Narrative
in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.

Well, there, Gentlemen—just there, and so simply—you have the first

condition of a work of art—its own creator is so possessed that he
thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the
words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures dance
under the circle of the lamp, until Good-bye, and off they go, to take
their chance of the dark!”

VIII
Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as
experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse—or indeed
what is the fault it cannot excuse.
All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised
by Mr. Saintsbury:

It cannot have taken many people of any competence in

criticism very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the
secret of this “new world” of Dickens lies. It lies, of course, in the
combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale
unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the other or
both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later books
this is frequently the case. But in Pickwick it hardly ever occurs;
and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension of
disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from verse to
prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short inset
stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a writer
who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If he had
spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have talked—
one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to talking
—some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master it
 (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in
practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered
probable or not improbable.

Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately
given, and not by me. It lies in the combination of the strictest realism
of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere.
Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many. In
his Christmas story, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners—an
adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you
make the mistake of despising—a handful of a British garrison with
their women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely
await an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to
one paragraph:
(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)

“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A

place too many in the line.”
The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the
foremost of them were already before the gate. More and more
came up with a great noise, and shouting loudly. When we
believed from the sound that they were all there, we gave three
English cheers. The poor little children joined, and were so fully
convinced of our being at play, that they enjoyed the noise, and
were heard clapping their hands in the silence that followed.

Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then
Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call
everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates scarce a
glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric world,
charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least afraid to
employ it—I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:

Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly

and wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every
Englishman.
 I need but to instance a writer whose acquaintance Hazlitt had not
the joy to make, nor Lamb—woe upon these divisions of time!—Lewis
Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of
detail—or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense Books
or even upon A Midsummer-Night’s Dream—to convince you that, as a
nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or he
deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.

IX
Yes, but there is something else.
What else—no mere artistic secret—ties this phantasmagoric
world to ours and makes it universal with ours, conterminous, and so
real?
It is no dodge or trick of artistry that can work so incredible a feat—
that can open our hearts to such beings as Dick Swiveller and Mrs.
Gamp (whom in private life you or I would avoid like the plague)—to
enjoy their company, to hang on every word they utter. It must be some
very simple catholic gift, thus to unite the unreal with the real, thus to
make brothers and sisters of all men and women, high or low.
It is: nor shall I delay you by elaborate pretence to search for it. For
I know; and you know, or will recognise it as soon as I utter the word. It
is Charity; the inestimable gift of Charity that Dickens flings over all
things as his magic mantle: so that, whether there be prophecies, they
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away; and whether there be little critics
tormented about Dickens’ style, in the folds of that mantle they shall be
folded and hushed:

That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or

by water, all women labouring of child, sick persons, and young
children; and to shew Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.
That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the
fatherless children, and widows, and all that are desolate and
 oppressed.

That is the last secret of Dickens: and that is what George Santayana
means when he writes:

If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the

melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite
adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the
pages of Dickens.
 DICKENS (V)

I
“I REMEMBER,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on The Art
of Fiction—

I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling

me that she was much commended for the impression she had
managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life
of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she
learned so much about this recondite being, she had been
congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities
consisted in her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a
staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a
pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table
round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only
a moment, but that moment was experience.

I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little

story in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man
rustically born and bred could not have written Hamlet or The
Tempest; “he would never have seen this, learned or experienced
that” and so on: the simple answer being that under such
disadvantage they would never have written Hamlet or The Tempest.
They are, in fact, not even Shakespeares to the extent of
understanding how an artist creates, how the imaginative mind
operates.
Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation,
simply comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct
personal impression and it was enough:
 She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also
had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so
that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and
produced a reality.
Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which
when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
much greater source of strength than any accident of residence
or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen
from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the
whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general
so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
and in the most different stages of education.

Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument

“this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But
for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative
genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to
catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one—” the
gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives
us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of
Wakefield—
Forms more real than living man.
You know—you must know—that none of these is a
photographic portrait of a living person—of a certain eccentric lodger
whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous
nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s,
next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”—but children
of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as
was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis
of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress
accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by
Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has
left this uncontradicted record: