Experimental Evidence of Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Kekulé-Ordered Graphene

Abstract

The low-energy excitations of graphene are relativistic massless Dirac fermions with opposite chiralities at valleys K and K^{'}. Breaking the chiral symmetry could lead to gap opening in analogy to dynamical mass generation in particle physics. Here we report direct experimental evidences of chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) from both microscopic and spectroscopic measurements in a Li-intercalated graphene. The CSB is evidenced by gap opening at the Dirac point, Kekulé-O type modulation, and chirality mixing near the gap edge. Our work opens up opportunities for investigating CSB related physics in a Kekulé-ordered graphene.