Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 12: Transport: Graphene and Carbon Nanostructures (jointly with DY, DS, HL, MA, O)

MA 12.2: Talk

Monday, March 20, 2017, 15:15–15:30, HSZ 204

Graphene p-n junction in a magnetic field as a valley switch — •Tibor Sekera, Rakesh P. Tiwari, and Christoph Bruder — Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland

Low-energy excitations in graphene exhibit relativistic properties due to the linear dispersion relation close to the Dirac points in the first Brillouin zone. Two of the cones located at opposite corners of the first Brillouin zone can be chosen as inequivalent, representing a new valley degree of freedom, in addition to the charge and spin of an electron. Using the valley degree of freedom to encode information aroused significant interest, both theoretically and experimentally, and gave rise to the field of valleytronics.

We study a graphene p-n junction in an out-of-plane magnetic field as a platform to generate and controllably manipulate the valley polarization of electrons. We show that by tuning the external potential giving rise to the p-n junction we can switch the current from one valley polarization to the other. We also consider the effect of different types of edge terminations and present a setup, where we can partition an incoming valley-unpolarized current into two branches of valley-polarized currents. The branching ratio can be chosen by changing the location of the p-n junction.