A pseudopotential model for Dirac electrons in graphene with line defects

Valleytronics in two-dimensional materials with line defect

The concept of valley originates from two degenerate but nonequivalent energy bands at the local minimum in the conduction band or local maximum in the valence band. Manipulating the valley states for information storage and processing develops a brand-new electronics-valleytronics. Broken inversion symmetry is a necessary condition to produce pure valley currents. The polycrystalline two-dimensional materials (graphene, silicene, monolayer group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides, etc) with pristine grains stitched together by disordered grain boundaries (GBs) are the natural inversion-symmetry-broken systems and the candidates in the field of valleytronics. Different from their pristine forms, the Dirac valleys on both sides of GBs are mismatched in the momentum space and induce peculiar valley transport properties across the GBs. In this review, we systematically demonstrate the fundamental properties of valley degree of freedom across mostly studied and experimentally feasible polycrystalline structure-the line defect, and the manipulation strategies with electrical, magnetic and mechanical methods to realize the valley polarization. We also introduce an effective numerical method, the non-equilibrium Green's function technique, to tackle the valley transport issues in the line defect systems. The present challenges and the perspective on the further investigations of the line defect in valleytronics are also summarized.

Induced Currents and Aharonov–Bohm Effect in Effective Fermion Models and in Spaces with a Compact Dimension

We consider fermion models in 3D- and 5D-space-time with an Aharonov–Bohm potential and a domain wall. Induced current is calculated, which is due to vacuum effects in the topologically nontrivial space-time. Violation of chiral symmetry and appearance of induced current is demonstrated in a simple example of quantum mechanical violation of symmetry in a model of a massless Dirac fermion moving in a background vector field and domain walls as barriers for the electron propagation. The effective Dirac equation for massless electrons modeling monolayer graphene is used. One of the solutions to the problem of describing domain walls in planar systems is reduced to finding exact analytic solutions. In this paper, we consider appearance of induced current in two-fermion model with a compact dimension as a result of vacuum polarization in the field of the external gauge field in the 4 + 1 and the 2 + 1 dimensional models with one type of fermions and with two types of fermions living in the brane and in the bulk. Two different approaches (Kaluza–Klein and Aharonov–Bohm) to the problem of induced current are used. Production of an induced current in a planar model with a thin solenoid is also studied.