We consider the orbital magnetic properties of noninteracting charge carriers in graphene-based nanostructures in the low-energy regime. The magnetic response of such systems results both from bulk contributions and from confinement effects that can be particularly strong in ballistic quantum dots. First we provide a comprehensive study of the magnetic susceptibility χ of bulk graphene in a magnetic field for the different regimes arising from the relative magnitudes of the energy scales involved, i.e., temperature, Landau-level spacing, and chemical potential. We show that for finite temperature or chemical potential, χ is not divergent although the diamagnetic contribution χ 0 from the filled valance band exhibits the well-known −B −1/2 dependence. We further derive oscillatory modulations of χ , corresponding to de Haas-van Alphen oscillations of conventional two-dimensional electron gases. These oscillations can be large in graphene, thereby compensating the diamagnetic contribution χ 0 and yielding a net paramagnetic susceptibility for certain energy and magnetic field regimes. Second, we predict and analyze corresponding strong, confinement-induced susceptibility oscillations in graphene-based quantum dots with amplitudes distinctly exceeding the corresponding bulk susceptibility. Within a semiclassical approach we derive generic expressions for orbital magnetism of graphene quantum dots with regular classical dynamics. Graphene-specific features can be traced back to pseudospin interference along the underlying periodic orbits. We demonstrate the quality of the semiclassical approximation by comparison with quantum-mechanical results for two exemplary mesoscopic systems, a graphene disk with infinite mass-type edges, and a rectangular graphene structure with armchair and zigzag edges, using numerical tight-binding calculations in the latter case.
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