Journal article

Strain-Induced Landau Levels in Arbitrary Dimensions with an Exact Spectrum

S Rachel, I Göthel, DP Arovas, M Vojta

Physical Review Letters | AMER PHYSICAL SOC | Published : 2016

Abstract

Certain nonuniform strain applied to graphene flakes has been shown to induce pseudo-Landau levels in the single-particle spectrum, which can be rationalized in terms of a pseudomagnetic field for electrons near the Dirac points. However, this Landau level structure is, in general, approximate and restricted to low energies. Here, we introduce a family of strained bipartite tight-binding models in arbitrary spatial dimension d and analytically prove that their entire spectrum consists of perfectly degenerate pseudo-Landau levels. This construction generalizes the case of triaxial strain on graphene's honeycomb lattice to arbitrary d; in d=3, our model corresponds to tetraxial strain on the d..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank C. Poli, H. Schomerus, W. Lang, and C. Timm for discussions and L. Fritz for previous collaborations on related topics. This research was supported by the DFG through Grants No. SFB 1143, No. SPP 1666, and No. GRK 1621, as well as by the Helmholtz association through Grant No. VI-521. D. P. A. is grateful for the hospitality of the ITP and SFB 1143 at TU Dresden.