Pseudomagnetic fields and triaxial strain in graphene

Abstract

Pseudomagnetic fields, which can result from nonuniform strain distributions, have received much attention in graphene systems due to the possibility of mimicking real magnetic fields with magnitudes of greater than 100 T. We examine systems with such strains confined to finite regions (``pseudomagnetic dots'') and provide a transparent explanation for the characteristic sublattice polarization occurring in the presence of a pseudomagnetic field. In particular, we focus on a triaxial strain leading to a constant field in the central region of the dot. This field causes the formation of pseudo-Landau levels, where the zeroth order level shows significant differences compared to the corresponding level in a real magnetic field. Analytic arguments based on the Dirac model are employed to predict the sublattice and valley dependencies of the density of states in these systems. Numerical tight-binding calculations of single pseudomagnetic dots in extended graphene sheets confirm these predictions, and are also used to study the effect of rotating the strain direction with respect to the underlying graphene lattice, and varying the size of the pseudomagnetic dot.