Orbital-free density functional theory of out-of-plane charge screening in graphene (Q897165)

A variant of the density functional theory of Thomas-Fermi-Dirac-von Weizsäcker type to describe the response of a single layer of graphene resting on a dielectric substrate to a point charge (or a collection of charges some distance away from the layer) is proposed. The variational setting with an energy functional admitting minimizers, both in the case of free graphene layers and under back-gating is formulated and the existence of conditions under which those minimizers are unique and correspond to configurations consisting of inhomogeneous density profiles of charge carrier of only one type are proved.