Uniaxial strain on gapped graphene

M. Farjam, H. Rafii-Tabar

Published 2009-09-28, updated 2010-05-10Version 2

We study the effect of uniaxial strain on the electronic band structure of gapped graphene. We consider two types of gapped graphene, one which breaks the symmetry between the two triangular sublattices (staggered model), and another which alternates the bonds on the honeycomb lattice (Kekul\'e model). In the staggered model, the effect of strains below a critical value is only a shift of the band gap location. In the Kekul\'e model, as strain is increased, band gap location is initially pinned to a corner of the Brillouin zone while its width diminishes, and after gap closure the location of the contact point begins to shift. Analytic and numerical results are obtained for both the tight-binding and Dirac fermion descriptions of gapped graphene.