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Materials Design from Nonequilibrium Steady States: Driven Graphene as a Tunable Semiconductor with Topological Properties

Thomas Iadecola, David Campbell, Claudio Chamon, Chang-Yu Hou, Roman Jackiw, So-Young Pi, and Silvia Viola Kusminskiy
Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 176603 – Published 25 April 2013
Physics logo See Synopsis: Shaking Open a Gap in Graphene

Abstract

Controlling the properties of materials by driving them out of equilibrium is an exciting prospect that has only recently begun to be explored. In this Letter we give a striking theoretical example of such materials design: a tunable gap in monolayer graphene is generated by exciting a particular optical phonon. We show that the system reaches a steady state whose transport properties are the same as if the system had a static electronic gap, controllable by the driving amplitude. Moreover, the steady state displays topological phenomena: there are chiral edge currents, which circulate a fractional charge e/2 per rotation cycle, with the frequency set by the optical phonon frequency.

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  • Received 11 February 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.176603

© 2013 American Physical Society

Synopsis

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Shaking Open a Gap in Graphene

Published 25 April 2013

To make graphene behave more like a semiconductor, researchers propose vibrating the lattice in a specific rotating pattern.

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Authors & Affiliations

Thomas Iadecola1, David Campbell1, Claudio Chamon1, Chang-Yu Hou2,3, Roman Jackiw4, So-Young Pi1, and Silvia Viola Kusminskiy5

  • 1Physics Department, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 5Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems and Fachbereich Physik, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195 Berlin, Germany

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Issue

Vol. 110, Iss. 17 — 26 April 2013

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