The electrical conductivity of graphene with a nonzero mass-gap parameter is investigated starting from the first principles of quantum electrodynamics in (2+1)-dimensional space-time at any temperature. The formalism of the polarization tensor defined over the entire plane of complex frequency is used. At zero temperature we reproduce the results for both real and imaginary parts of the conductivity, obtained previously in the local approximation, and generalize them taking into account the effects of nonlocality. At nonzero temperature the exact analytic expressions for real and imaginary parts of the longitudinal and transverse conductivities of gapped graphene are derived, as well as their local limits and approximate expressions in several asymptotic regimes. Specifically, a simple local result for the real part of conductivity of gapped graphene valid at any temperature is obtained. According to our results, the real part of the conductivity is not equal to zero for frequencies exceeding the width of the gap and goes to the universal conductivity with increasing frequency. The imaginary part of conductivity of gapped graphene varies from infinity at zero frequency to minus infinity at the frequency defined by the gap parameter and then goes to zero with further increase of frequency. The analytic expressions are accompanied by the results of numerical computations. Possible future generalization of the used formalism is discussed.
This is a theoretical study of electron transport in gated bilayer graphene - a novel semiconducting material with a tunable band gap. It is shown that the which-layer pseudospin coherence enhances the subgap conductivity and facilitates the thermally activated transport. The mechanism proposed can also lead to the non-monotonic conductivity vs. temperature dependence at a band gap size of the order of 10 meV. The effect can be observed in gapped bilayer graphene sandwiched in boron nitride where the electron-hole puddles and flexural phonons are strongly suppressed.
We study the optical conductivity of a doped graphene when a sublattice symmetry breaking is occurred in the presence of the electron-phonon interaction. Our study is based on the Kubo formula that is established upon the retarded self-energy. We report new features of both the real and imaginary parts of the quasiparticle self-energy in the presence of a gap opening. We find an analytical expression for the renormalized Fermi velocity of massive Dirac Fermions over broad ranges of electron densities, gap values and the electron-phonon coupling constants. Finally we conclude that the inclusion…
We report our theoretical calculations on the temperature and energy dependent electrical conductivity of gapped graphene within the framework of Boltzmann transport formalism. Since screening effects have known to be of vital importance in explaining the conductivity of gapless graphene therefore we first worked out the behaviour of the temperature dependent polarization function for gapped graphene as a function of wave vector and band gap, respectively. Polarization of gapped graphene has been compared with that of gapless graphene, bilayer graphene and 2DEG to see the effects of gap. It is…
We present a theoretical study of gap opening in the zeroth Landau level in gapped graphene as a result of pseudo-Zeeman interaction. The applied magnetic field couples with the valley pseudospin degree of freedom of the charge carriers leading to the pseudo-Zeeman interaction. To investigate its role in transport at the Charge Neutrality Point (CNP), we study the integer quantum Hall effect (QHE) in gapped graphene in an angular magnetic field in the presence of pseudo-Zeeman interaction. Analytical expressions are derived for the Hall conductivity using Kubo-Greenwood formula. We also determ…
We present a general formulation to calculate the dynamic optical conductivity, beyond the linear response regime, of any electronic system whose quasiparticle dispersion is described by a two band model. Our phenomenological model is based on the optical Bloch equations. In the steady state regime it yields an analytic solution for the population inversion and the interband coherence, which are nonlinear in the optical field intensity, including finite doping and temperature effects. We explicitly show that the optical nonlinearities are controlled by a single dimensionless parameter which is…
The anomalous spin transport coefficients of gapped Dirac electrons are studied with application to a quasi-two-dimensional organic conductor $α$-(BETS)$_2$I$_3$ in mind. In the presence of a gap induced by spin-orbit interaction, we show that the effective Hamiltonian is similar to the model considered by Kane and Mele with additional tilting. With this effective Hamiltonian, conductivity tensors up to the linear order of the applied magnetic field are obtained analytically using the microscopic linear response theory or Kubo formula. It is shown that spin Hall conductivity and anomalous diag…
The interband optical response of a three-dimensional Dirac cone is linear in photon energy ($Ω$). Here, we study the evolution of the interband response within a model Hamiltonian which contains Dirac, Weyl and gapped semimetal phases. In the pure Dirac case, a single linear dependence is observed, while in the Weyl phase, we find two quasilinear regions with different slopes. These regions are also distinct from the large-$Ω$ dependence. As the boundary between the Weyl (WSM) and gapped phases is approached, the slope of the low-$Ω$ response increases, while the photon-energy range over whic…
We calculate the Hall viscosity and the nonlocal (i.e., dependent on wave vector $\bm q$) Hall conductivity of "gapped graphene" (a non-topological insulator with two valleys) in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field. Using the linear-response theory at zero temperature within the Dirac approximation for the Landau levels, we present analytical expressions for both valley and total Hall viscosity and conductivity up to $\bm q^2$ at all frequencies. Although the final formulas for total Hall viscosity and conductivity are similar to the ones previously obtained for gapless graph…
We study the frequency-dependent conductivity of nodal line semimetals (NLSMs), focusing on the effects of carrier density and energy dispersion on the nodal line. We find that the low-frequency conductivity has a rich spectral structure which can be understood using scaling rules derived from the geometry of their Dupin cyclide Fermi surfaces. We identify different frequency regimes, find scaling rules for the optical conductivity in each, and demonstrate them with numerical calculations of the inter- and intraband contributions to the optical conductivity using a low-energy model for a gener…
In this paper, we make a comprehensive study of the properties of a gapped Dirac semimetal model, which was originally proposed in the magnetoinfrared spectroscopy measurement of ZeTe$_5$, and includes both the linear and parabolic dispersions in all three directions. We find that, depending on the band inversion parameters, $ζ'$ and $ζ_z'$, the model can support three different phases: the single Dirac point (DP) phase, the double DPs phase and the Dirac ring phase. The three different phases can be distinguished by their low-energy features in the density of states (DOS) and optical conducti…
We study the Magnus transport in a gapped 2D electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling using semiclassical Boltzmann transport formalism. Apart from its signature in the charge transport coefficients, the inclusion of Magnus velocity in the spin current operator enables us to study Magnus spin transport in the system. In particular, we study the roles of mass gap and Fermi surface topology on the behavior of Magnus Hall and Nernst conductivities and their spin counterparts. We find that the Magnus spin Hall conductivity vanishes in the limit of zero gap, unlike the universal spin Hall condu…
We consider the relationship between the tight-binding Hamiltonian of the two-dimensional honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms with nearest neighbor hopping only and the 2+1 dimensional Hamiltonian of quantum electrodynamics which follows in the continuum limit. We pay particular attention to the symmetries of the free Dirac fermions including spatial inversion, time reversal, charge conjugation and chirality. We illustrate the power of such a mapping by considering the effect of the possible symmetry breaking which corresponds to the creation of a finite Dirac mass, on various optical properties…
In this paper, we numerically study the bound electron states induced by long range Coulomb impurity in gapped graphene and the quasi-bound states in supercritical region based on the lattice model. We present a detailed comparison between our numerical simulations and the prediction of the continuum model which is described by the Dirac equation in (2+1)-dimensional Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). We also use the Fano's formalism to investigate the quasi-bound state development and design an accessible experiments to test the decay of the supercritical vacuum in the gapped graphene.
Recent theoretical studies have found quantum spin liquid states with spinon Fermi surfaces upon the application of a magnetic field on a gapped state with topological order. We investigate the thermal Hall conductivity across this transition, describing how the quantized thermal Hall conductivity of the gapped state changes to an unquantized thermal Hall conductivity in the gapless spinon Fermi surface state. We consider two cases, both of potential experimental interest: the state with non-Abelian Ising topological order on the honeycomb lattice, and the state with Abelian chiral spin liquid…
Gapped graphene has been proposed to be a good platform to observe the valley Hall effect, a transport phenomenon involving the flow of electrons that are characterized by different valley indices. In the present work, we show that this phenomenon is better described as an instance of the orbital Hall effect, where the ambiguous "valley" indices are replaced by a physical quantity, the orbital magnetic moment, which can be defined uniformly over the entire Brillouin zone. This description removes the arbitrariness in the choice of arbitrary cut-off for the valley-restricted integrals in the va…
An approach that has been given promising results concerning investigations on the physics of graphene is the so-called reduced quantum electrodynamics. In this work we consider the natural generalization of this formalism to curved spaces. We employ the local momentum space representation. We discuss the validity of the Ward identity and study one-loop diagrams in detail. We show that the one-loop beta function is zero. As an application, we calculate the one-loop optical conductivity of graphene by taking into account curvature effects which can be incorporated locally. In addition, we demon…
We consider a theory of a two-component Dirac fermion localized on a (2+1) dimensional brane coupled to a (3+1) dimensional bulk. Using the fermionic particle-vortex duality, we show that the theory has a strong-weak duality that maps the coupling $e$ to $\tilde e=(8π)/e$. We explore the theory at $e^2=8π$ where it is self-dual. The electrical conductivity of the theory is a constant independent of frequency. When the system is at finite density and magnetic field at filling factor $ν=\frac12$, the longitudinal and Hall conductivity satisfies a semicircle law, and the ratio of the longitudinal…
We study the optical properties of gapped graphene in presence of a magnetic field. We consider a model based on the Dirac equation, with a gap introduced via a mass term, for which analytical expressions for the diagonal and Hall optical conductivities can be derived. We discuss the effect of the mass term on electron-hole symmetry and $π$-$π^*$ symmetry and its implications for the optical Hall conductivity. We compare these results with those obtained using a tight-binding model, in which the mass is modeled via a staggered potential and a magnetic field is included via a Peierls substituti…
Thermoelectric properties of two-dimensional (2D) Dirac materials are calculated within linearized Boltzmann transport theory and relaxation time approximation. We find that the gapless 2D Dirac material exhibits poorer thermoelectric performance than the gapped one. Furthermore, there exists an optimal band gap for maximizing the figure of merit (ZT) in the gapped 2D Dirac material. The optimal band gap ranges from 6kBT to 18kBT, where kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the operating temperature in kelvin. This result, which is similar to that for bulk semiconductors, indicates the importa…
The optical properties of dielectric plates coated with gapped graphene are investigated on the basis of first principles of quantum electrodynamics. The reflection coefficients and reflectivities of graphene-coated plates are expressed in terms of the polarization tensor of gapped graphene and the dielectric permittivity of plate material. Simple approximate expressions for the required combinations of components of the polarization tensor applicable in the wide frequency region, where the presence of a gap influences the optical properties, are found. Numerical computations of the reflectivi…
Gapped 2D Dirac materials, in which inversion symmetry is broken by a gap-opening perturbation, feature a unique valley transport regime. The system ground state hosts dissipationless persistent valley currents existing even when topologically protected edge modes are absent or when they are localized due to edge roughness. Topological valley currents in such materials are dominated by bulk currents produced by electronic states just beneath the gap rather than by edge modes. Dissipationless currents induced by an external bias are characterized by a quantized half-integer valley Hall conducti…
Recently synthesized 3D materials with Dirac spectrum exhibit peculiar electric transport qualitatively different from its 2D analogue, graphene. Neglecting impuritiy scattering, the real part of the conductivity is strongly frequency dependent (linear), while the imaginary part is non-zero (unlike in undoped, clean graphene). The Coulomb interaction between electrons is unscreened as in a dielectric and hence is long range. We demonstrate that the interaction correction renders the electrodynamics nonlocal on a mesoscopic\ scale. The longitudinal conductivity $σ_{L}$ (related by charge conser…
We investigate the scaling properties of the recently acquired fermionic non--linear $σ$--model which controls gapless diffusive modes in a two--dimensional disordered system of Dirac electrons beyond charge neutrality. The transport on large scales is governed by a novel renormalizable nonlocal field theory. For zero mean random gap, it is characterized by the absence of a dynamic gap generation and a scale invariant diffusion coefficient. The $β$ function of the DC conductivity, computed for this model, is in perfect agreement with numerical results obtained previously.
We consider the quantum Hall effect in quantum electrodynamics and find a deviation from the quantum mechanical prediction for the Hall conductivity due to radiative antiscreening of electric charge in an external magnetic field. A weak universal dependence of the von Klitzing constant on the magnetic field strength, which can possibly be observed in a dedicated experiment, is predicted.
The zero gap surface states of a 3D-topological insulator host Dirac fermions with spin locked to the momentum. The gap-less Dirac fermions exhibit electronic behaviour different from those predicted in conventional materials. While calculations based on a simple linear dispersion can account for observed experimental patterns, a more accurate match is obtained by including higher order $ \overrightarrow{k}$ terms in the Hamiltonian. In this work, in presence of a time reversal symmetry breaking external magnetic field and higher order warping term, alteration to the topologically ordained Ber…
In this work, we present numerical results for the second and third order conductivities of the plain graphene and gapped graphene monolayers associated with the second and third harmonic generation, the optical rectification and the optical Kerr effect. The frequencies considered here range from the microwave to the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum, the latter end of which had not yet been studied. These calculations are performed in the velocity gauge and directly address the components of the conductivity tensor. In the velocity gauge, the radiation field is represented by a power series…
We determine the Hall conductivity of light-driven graphene, with specific focus on its frequency dependence, and compare it to the static effective approximation, based on Floquet states. This approximation gives the Haldane model as the effective model for light-driven graphene, with a gapped spectrum and a quantized Hall conductivity of $-2e^2/h$. We simulate both the light-driven and the effective model, and explicitly include the dissipative environment in our simulations. We investigate the effect of different driving regimes and dissipation strengths on the Hall conductivity in graphene…
We study spin conductivity of the surface states in a thin film of a topological insulator with Kubo formulas. Hybridization between the different sides of the film opens a gap at the Dirac point. We found that in the gapped region spin conductivity remains finite. In the gapless region near the band gap spin conductivity is enhanced. These findings make a thin film of a topological insulator as a promising material for spintronic applications.
Graphene is the first example of truly two-dimensional crystals - it's just one layer of carbon atoms. It turns out to be a gapless semiconductor with unique electronic properties resulting from the fact that charge carriers in graphene demonstrate charge-conjugation symmetry between electrons and holes and possess an internal degree of freedom similar to ``chirality'' for ultrarelativistic elementary particles. It provides unexpected bridge between condensed matter physics and quantum electrodynamics (QED). In particular, the relativistic Zitterbewegung leads to the minimum conductivity of or…
Multi-Weyl semimetals are new types of Weyl semimetals which have anisotropic non-linear energy dispersion and a topological charge larger than one, thus exhibiting a unique quantum response. Using a unified lattice model, we calculate the optical conductivity numerically in the multi-Weyl semimetal phase and in its neighboring gapped states, and obtain the characteristic frequency dependence of each phase analytically using a low-energy continuum model. The frequency dependence of longitudinal and transverse optical conductivities obeys scaling relations that are derived from the winding numb…
We study the electronic contribution to the main thermoelectric properties of a molecular junction consisting of a single quantum dot coupled to graphene external leads. The system electrical conductivity (G), Seebeck coefficient ($S$), and the thermal conductivity ($κ$), are numerically calculated based on a Green's function formalism that includes contributions up to the Hartree-Fock level. We consider the system leads to be made either of pure or gapped-graphene. To describe the free electrons in the gapped-graphene electrodes we used two possible scenarios, the massive gap scenario, and th…
We discuss the optical conductivity of several non-interacting two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting systems focusing on gapped Dirac and Schrödinger fermions as well as on a system mixing these two types. Close to the band-gap, we can define a universal optical conductivity quantum of $σ_0=\frac{1}{16}\frac{e^2}{\hbar}$ for the pure systems. The effective optical conductivity then depends on the degeneracy factors $g_s$ (spin) and $g_v$ (valley) and on the curvature around the band-gap $ν$, i.e., it generally reads $σ=g_sg_vνσ_0$. For a system composed of both types of carriers, the optical con…
Terahertz electrodynamics in a zero-field Wigner crystal
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute（卡弗里纳米科学能源研究所）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；National Institute for Materials Science（日本物质材料研究机构）
We report on the emergence of bulk, valley-polarized currents in graphene-based devices, driven by spatially varying regions of broken sublattice symmetry, and revealed by non-local resistance ($R_\mathrm{NL}$) fingerprints. By using a combination of quantum transport formalisms, giving access to bulk properties as well as multi-terminal device responses, the presence of a non-uniform local bandgap is shown to give rise to valley-dependent scattering and a finite Fermi surface contribution to the valley Hall conductivity, related to characteristics of $R_\mathrm{NL}$. These features are robust…
In a vicinity of the Fermi surface, graphene layers with bandgaps allow for closely simulating the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics and, thus, its yet unverified strong-field phenomenology with accessible field strengths. This striking feature is exploited to investigate a plausible materialization of dynamically assisted pair production through the analog production of light but massive pairs of Dirac quasiparticles. The process is considered in a field configuration combining a weak high-frequency electric mode and a strong low-frequency electric field oscillating in time. Its theoretical s…
We show that the optical spin conductivity being a small AC response of a bulk spin current and elusive in condensed matter systems can be measured in ultracold atoms. We demonstrate that this conductivity contains rich information on quantum states by analyzing experimentally achievable systems such as a spin-1/2 superfluid Fermi gas, a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate, and a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. The obtained conductivity spectra being absent in the Drude conductivity reflect quasiparticle excitations and non-Fermi liquid properties. Accessible physical quantities include the superfluid …
We show that the optical transparency of suspended graphene is defined by the fine structure constant, alpha, the parameter that describes coupling between light and relativistic electrons and is traditionally associated with quantum electrodynamics rather than condensed matter physics. Despite being only one atom thick, graphene is found to absorb a significant (pi times alpha=2.3%) fraction of incident white light, which is a consequence of graphene's unique electronic structure. This value translates into universal dynamic conductivity G =e^2/4h_bar within a few percent accuracy.
The linear energy dispersion of graphene electrons leads to a strongly nonlinear electromagnetic response of this material. We develop a general quantum theory of the third-order nonlinear local dynamic conductivity of graphene $σ_{αβγδ}(ω_1,ω_2,ω_3)$, which describes its nonlinear response to a uniform electromagnetic radiation. The derived analytical formulas describe a large number of different nonlinear phenomena such as the third harmonic generation, the four wave mixing, the saturable absorption, the second harmonic generation stimulated by a dc electric current, etc., which may be used …
We construct a minimal theory describing the optical activity of a thin sheet of a twisted material, the simplest example of which is twisted bilayer graphene. We introduce the notion of "twisted electrical conductivity", which parametrizes the parity-odd response of a thin film to a perpendicularly falling electromagnetic waves with wavelength larger than the thickness of the sheet. We show that the low-frequency Faraday rotation angle has different behaviors in different phases. For an insulator, the Faraday angle behaves as $ω^2$ at low frequencies, with the coefficient being determined by …
We study the effects of disorder on bilayer graphene using four different microscopic models and directly compare their results. We compute the self-energy, density of states, and optical conductivity in the presence of short-ranged scatterers and screened Coulomb impurities, using both the Born approximation and self-consistent Born approximation for the self-energy. We also include a finite interlayer potential asymmetry which generates a gap between the valence and conduction bands. We find that the qualitative behavior of the two scattering potentials are similar, but that the choice of ap…
We study the Hall conductivity in single layer gapped Dirac fermion materials including coupling to a phonon field, which not only modifies the quasi-particle dynamics through the usual self-energy term but also renormalizes directly the gap. Consequently the Berry curvature is modified. As the temperature is increased the sign of the renormalized gap can change and the material can cross over from a band insulator to a topological insulator at higher temperature (T). The effective Chern numbers defined for valley and spin Hall conductivity show a rich phase diagram with increasing temperature…
We present a perturbative method for calculating the optical Hall conductivity in a tight-binding framework based on the Kubo formalism. The method involves diagonalization only of the Hamiltonian in absence of the magnetic field, and thus avoids the computational problems usually arising due to the huge magnetic unit cells required to maintain translational invariance in presence of a Peierls phase. A recipe for applying the method to numerical calculations of the magneto-optical response is presented. We apply the formalism to the case of ordinary and gapped graphene in a next-nearest neighb…
In the present paper, using Pseudo-Quantum Electrodynamics to describe the interaction between electrons in graphene, we investigate the longitudinal and optical conductivities of a neutral graphene sheet near a grounded perfectly conducting surface, with calculations up to 2-loop perturbation order. We show that the longitudinal conductivity increases as we bring the conducting surface closer to the graphene sheet. On the other hand, although the optical conductivity initially increases with the proximity of the plate, it reaches a maximum value, tending, afterwards, to the minimal conductivi…
Bilayer graphene (BLG) at the charge neutrality point (CNP) is strongly susceptible to electronic interactions, and expected to undergo a phase transition into a state with spontaneous broken symmetries. By systematically investigating a large number of singly- and doubly-gated bilayer graphene (BLG) devices, we show that an insulating state appears only in devices with high mobility and low extrinsic doping. This insulating state has an associated transition temperature Tc~5K and an energy gap of ~3 meV, thus strongly suggesting a gapped broken symmetry state that is destroyed by very weak di…
We study the low-energy quantum electrodynamics of electrons and holes, in a thin graphene wire. We develop an effective field theory (EFT) based on an expansion in p/p_T, where p_T is the typical momentum of electrons and holes in the transverse direction, while p are the momenta in the longitudinal direction. We show that, to the lowest-order in (p/p_T), our EFT theory is formally equivalent to the exactly solvable Schwinger model. By exploiting such an analogy, we find that the ground state of the quantum wire contains a condensate of electron-hole pairs. The excitation spectrum is saturate…
