Valley Subband Splitting in Bilayer Graphene Quantum Point Contacts

Abstract

We report a study of one-dimensional subband splitting in a bilayer graphene quantum point contact in which quantized conductance in steps of 4e^{2}/h is clearly defined down to the lowest subband. While our source-drain bias spectroscopy measurements reveal an unconventional confinement, we observe a full lifting of the valley degeneracy at high magnetic fields perpendicular to the bilayer graphene plane for the first two lowest subbands where confinement and Coulomb interactions are the strongest and a peculiar merging or mixing of K and K^{'} valleys from two nonadjacent subbands with indices (N,N+2), which are well described by our semiphenomenological model.