Landau Levels and Quantum Hall Effect in Graphene Superlattices

Cheol-Hwan Park, Young-Woo Son, Li Yang, Marvin L. Cohen, Steven G. Louie

Published 2009-03-18, updated 2009-07-24Version 2

We show that, when graphene is subjected to an appropriate one-dimensional external periodic potential, additional branches of massless fermions are generated with nearly the same electron-hole crossing energy as that at the original Dirac point of graphene. Because of these new zero-energy branches, the Landau levels at charge neutral filling becomes 4(2N+1)-fold degenerate (with N=0,1,2,..., tunable by the potential strength and periodicity) with the corresponding Hall conductivity $\sigma_{xy}$ showing a step of size 4(2N+1)$e^2/h$. These theoretical findings are robust against variations in the details of the external potential and provide measurable signatures of the unusual electronic structure of graphene superlattices.