Fermi velocity renormalization and dynamical gap generation in graphene

We study the renormalization of the Fermi velocity by the long-range Coulomb interactions between the charge carriers in the Dirac-cone approximation for the effective low-energy description of the electronic excitations in graphene at half filling. Solving the coupled system of Dyson-Schwinger equations for the dressing functions in the corresponding fermion propagator with various approximations for the particle-hole polarization we observe that Fermi velocity renormalization effects generally lead to a considerable increase of the critical coupling for dynamical gap generation and charge-density wave formation at the semimetal-insulator transition.