The basic properties of $π$-electrons near the Fermi level in graphene are reviewed from a point of view of the pseudospin and a gauge field coupling to the pseudospin. The applications of the gauge field to the electron-phonon interaction and to the edge states are reported.
The energy spectrum of planar polytype graphene-based superlattices has been investigated. It is shown that their energy spectrum undergoes pseudospin splitting due to the asymmetry of quantum wells forming the superlattice potential profile.
The possibility of transporting spin information over long distances in graphene, owing to its small intrinsic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and the absence of hyperfine interaction, has led to intense research into spintronic applications. However, measured spin relaxation times are orders of magnitude smaller than initially predicted, while the main physical process for spin dephasing and its charge-density and disorder dependences remain unconvincingly described by conventional mechanisms. Here, we unravel a spin relaxation mechanism for nonmagnetic samples that follows from an entanglement bet…
Electronic states in 2D materials can exhibit pseudospin degrees of freedom, which allow for unique carrier-field interaction scenarios. Here, we investigate ultrafast sublattice pseudospin relaxation in graphene by means of polarization-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy. Comparison with microscopic Boltzmann simulations allows to determine a lifetime of the optically aligned pseudospin distribution of $12\pm 2\,\text{fs}$. This experimental approach extends the toolbox of graphene pseudospintronics, providing novel means to investigate pseudospin dynamics in active devices or under exte…
The Dirac electrons of graphene, an intrinsic zero gap semiconductor, uniquely carry spin and pseudospin that give rise to many fascinating electronic and transport properties. While isolated zigzag graphene nanoribbons are antiferromagnetic semiconductors, we show by means of first-principles and tight-binding calculations that zigzag graphene nanoribbons supported on graphene are half-metallic as a result of spin- and pseudospin-symmetry breaking. In particular, half-metallic Dirac cones are formed at K (K') near the Fermi level. The present results demonstrate that the unique combination of…
Vortex is a universal and significant phenomenon that has been known for centuries. However, creating vortices to the atomic limit has remained elusive because that the characteristic length to support a vortex is usually much larger than the atomic scale. Very recently, it was demonstrated that intervalley scattering induced by the single carbon defect of graphene leads to phase winding over a closed path surrounding the defect. Motivated by this, we demonstrate, in this Letter, that the single carbon defects at A and B sublattices of graphene can be regarded as pseudospin-mediated atomic-sca…
Modifying the hexagonal lattices of graphene enables the repositioning and merging of the Dirac cones which proves to be a key element in the use of these materials for alternative electronic applications such as valleytronics. Here we study the nonequilibrium transport of carriers within a system containing two Dirac cones in both standard graphene and semi-Dirac graphene. In the latter, the lattice modifications cause the relativistic and parabolic dispersion bands to coexist, furnishing the Fermi surface with a rich pseudospin texture and a versatile Dirac cones separation. We construct a k…
Hamiltonian and eigenstate problem is formulated for a bilayer graphene in terms of Clifford's geometric algebra \textit{Cl}$_{3,1}$. It is shown that such approach allows to perform analytical calculations in a simple way if geometrical algebra rotors are used. The measured quantities are express through spectrum and rotation half-angle of the pseudospin that appears in geometric algebra rotors. Properties of free charge carriers -- pseudospin, velocity and Berry phase -- in a bilayer graphene are investigated in the presence of the external voltage applied between the two layers.
Pseudospin, an additional degree of freedom inherent in graphene, plays a key role in understanding many fundamental phenomena such as the anomalous quantum Hall effect, electron chirality and Klein paradox. Unlike the electron spin, the pseudospin was traditionally considered as an unmeasurable quantity, immune to Stern-Gerlach-type experiments. Recently, however, it has been suggested that graphene pseudospin is a real angular momentum that might manifest itself as an observable quantity, but so far direct tests of such a momentum remained unfruitful. Here, by selective excitation of two sub…
Chiral quasiparticles in Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene have valley-contrasting Berry phases of 2π. This nontrival topological structure, associated with the pseudospin winding along a closed Fermi surface, is responsible for various novel electronic properties, such as anti-Klein tunneling, unconventional quantum Hall effect, and valley Hall effect1-6. Here we show that the quantum interference due to intervalley scattering induced by atomic defects/impurities provides further insights into the topological nature of the bilayer graphene. The scattered chiral quasiparticles between distinct v…
Strong spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in graphene grown on tungsten disulfide (WS2) has been recently observed, leading to energy gap opening by SOI. Energy gap in graphene may also be induced by sublattice symmetry breaking (SSB) where energy level in A-sublattice is not equal to that in B-sublattice. SSB-gap may be produced by growing graphene on hexagonal boron nitride or silicon carbide. In this work, we investigate transport property in a SOI/SSB/SOI gapped graphene junction, focusing the effect of interplay of SOI and SSB. We find that, lattice-pseudospin polarization (L-PSP) can be contro…
We have investigated the role of pseudospin polarization in electron wave packet dynamics in pristine graphene and in a graphene antidot lattice subject to an external magnetic field. Employing a Green's function formalism, we show that the electron dynamics can be controlled by tuning pseudospin polarization. We find that in Landau quantized pristine graphene both the propagation of an electron wave packet and Zitterbewegung oscillations strongly depend on pseudospin polarization. The electron wave packet is found to propagate in the direction of initial pseudospin polarization. We also show …
Note on lattice spin in graphene and "spin from isospin" phenomenon
众所周知,在紧束缚近似下,石墨烯蜂窝晶格中K/K'点附近的低能电子动力学可以用2+1无质量Dirac方程描述。石墨烯的自旋等价物,“赝自旋”,是由蜂窝晶格的每个单元格的两个不等价原子位置引入的简并引起的。Mecklenburg和Regan(Phys. Rev. Lett. 106(2011),116803)已经表明,与通常的观点相反,赝自旋具有实角动量的所有属性。在某些情况下,内部对称性可以对角动量产生重要的贡献。这种现象在粒子物理学中已经知道很多年了,并被称为“来自同位旋的自旋”。我们表明,类似的机制工作的情况下,晶格赝自旋。
We foretell a new pseudospin-dependent phenomenon in mono-layer graphene (MLG), which is numerically simulated \emph{via} an innovator nano-spintronic device. We proposed a novel theoretical procedure for describing the dynamics of Dirac fermions, departing from classic theoretical modelling. More importantly, we have found appealing evidences of wiggling anti-phase oscillations in the probability density time-distribution for each sub-lattice state, which we called pseudospinorial Zitterbewegung effect (PZBE). The PZBE undergoes modulated by a robust transient character, with decay time of fe…
Interband optical transitions in graphene are subject to pseudospin selection rules. Impulsive excitation with linearly polarized light generates an anisotropic photocarrier occupation in momentum space that evolves at timescales shorter than 100fs. Here, we investigate the evolution of non-equilibrium charges towards an isotropic distribution by means of fluence-dependent ultrafast spectroscopy and develop an analytical model able to quantify the isotropization process. In contrast to conventional semiconductors, the isotropization is governed by optical phonon emission, rather than electron-…
Spin manipulation is one of the most critical challenges to realize spin-based logic devices and spintronic circuits. Graphene has been heralded as an ideal material to achieve spin manipulation but so far new paradigms and demonstrators are limited. Here we show that certain impurities such as fluorine ad-atoms, which locally break sublattice symmetry without the formation of strong magnetic moment, could result in a remarkable variability of spin transport characteristics. The impurity resonance level is found to be associated with a long range sublattice pseudospin polarization, which by lo…
Based on the quantum kinetic equations for systems with SU(2) structure, regularization-free density and pseudospin currents are calculated in graphene realized as the infinite mass-limit of electrons with quadratic dispersion and a proper spin-orbit coupling. Correspondingly the currents possess no quasiparticle part but only anomalous parts. The intraband and interband conductivities are discussed with respect to magnetic fields and magnetic domain puddles. It is found that the magnetic field and meanfield of domains can be represented by an effective Zeeman field. For large Zeeman fields th…
The pseudospin quantum degree of freedom is one of the most remarkable properties of graphene that distinguishes it from ordinary two-dimensional metals and semiconductors. Pseudospin quantum interference leads to weak antilocalization (WAL) and is influenced strongly by point defects and thermal perturbations that break chirality and destroy phase coherence. Preserving and manipulating quantum transport properties up to room temperature is key to realizing practical pseudospin-based graphene devices. Here we report fabrication and transport characterization of graphene field-effect devices on…
We present a detailed theoretical study of bilayer-graphene's electronic properties in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. Using group-theoretical methods, we derive an invariant expansion of the Hamiltonian for electron states near the K point of the Brillouin zone. In contrast to known materials, including single-layer graphene, any possible coupling of physical quantities to components of the external electric (magnetic) field has a counterpart where the analogous component of the magnetic (electric) field couples to exactly the same combination of quantities. For example, a purel…
The control of physical properties of solids with short laser pulses is an intriguing prospect of ultrafast materials science. Continuous-wave high-frequency laser driving with circular polarization was predicted to induce a light-matter coupled new state possessing a quasi-static band structure with an energy gap and a quantum Hall effect, coined "Floquet topological insulator". Whereas the envisioned Floquet topological insulator requires well separated Floquet bands and therefore high-frequency pumping, a natural follow-up question regards the creation of Floquet-like states in graphene wit…
The pseudospin of Dirac electrons in graphene manifests itself in a peculiar momentum anisotropy for photo-excited electron-hole pairs. These interband excitations are in fact forbidden along the direction of the light polarization, and are maximum perpendicular to it. Here, we use time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to investigate the resulting unconventional hot carrier dynamics, sampling carrier distributions as a function of energy and in-plane momentum. We first show that the rapidly-established quasi-thermal electron distribution initially exhibits an azimuth-dependent te…
The chiral two-dimensional electron gas in Landau levels $\left\vert N\right\vert >0$ of a Bernal-stacked graphene bilayer has a valley-pseudospin Ising quantum Hall ferromagnetic behavior at odd filling factors $ν_{N}=1,3$ of these fourfold degenerate states. At zero interlayer electrical bias, the ground state at these fillings is spin polarized and electrons occupy one valley or the other while a finite electrical bias produces a series of valley pseudospin-flip transitions. In this work, we extend the Ising behavior to chirally-stacked multilayer graphene and discuss the hysteretic behavio…
We present a theory of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene in which attraction is generated between electrons on the same honeycomb sublattice when the system is close to a sublattice polarization instability. The resulting Cooper pairs are spin-polarized valley-singlets. Because the sublattice polarizability is mainly contributed by interband fluctuations, superconductivity occurs over a wide range of filling fraction. It is suppressed by i) applying a sublattice polarizing field (generated by an aligned BN substrate) or ii) changing moiré band filling to favor valley polarization. …
Friedel oscillation is a well-known wave phenomenon, which represents the oscillatory response of electron waves to imperfection. By utilizing the pseudospin-momentum locking in gapless graphene, two recent experiments demonstrate the measurement of the topological Berry phase by corresponding to the unique number of wavefront dislocations in Friedel oscillations. Here, we study the Friedel oscillations in gapped graphene, in which the pseudospin-momentum locking is broken. Unusually, the wavefront dislocations do occur as that in gapless graphene, which expects the immediate verification in t…
One of the intriguing characteristics of honeycomb lattices is the appearance of a pseudo-magnetic field as a result of mechanical deformation. In the case of graphene, the Landau quantization resulting from this pseudo-magnetic field has been measured using scanning tunneling microscopy. Here we show that a signature of the pseudo-magnetic field is a local sublattice symmetry breaking observable as a redistribution of the local density of states. This can be interpreted as a polarization of graphene's pseudospin due to a strain induced pseudo-magnetic field, in analogy to the alignment of a r…
We develop a theory for the optical conductivity of doped multilayer graphene including the effects of electron-electron interactions. Applying the quantum kinetic formalism, we formulate a set of pseudospin Bloch equations that governs the dynamics of the nonequilibrium density matrix driven by an external \emph{a.c.} electric field under the influence of Coulomb interactions. These equations reveal a dynamical mechanism that couples the Drude and interband responses arising from the chirality of pseudospin textures in multilayer graphene systems. We demonstrate that this results in an intera…
Graphene electrons feature a pair of massless Dirac cones of opposite pseudospin chirality at two valleys. Klein tunneling refers to the intriguing capability of these chiral electrons to penetrate through high and wide potential barrier. The two valleys have been treated independently in the literature, where time reversal symmetry dictates that neither the normal incidence transmission nor the angle-averaged one can have any valley polarization. Here we show that, when intervalley scattering by barrier is accounted, graphene electrons normally incident at a superlattice barrier can experienc…
Valley pseudospin, the quantum degree of freedom characterizing the degenerate valleys in energy bands, is a distinct feature of two-dimensional Dirac materials. Similar to spin, the valley pseudospin is spanned by a time reversal pair of states, though the two valley pseudospin states transform to each other under spatial inversion. The breaking of inversion symmetry induces various valley-contrasted physical properties; for instance, valley-dependent topological transport is of both scientific and technological interests. Bilayer graphene (BLG) is a unique system whose intrinsic inversion sy…