Topological aspects of graphene: Dirac fermions and the bulk-edge correspondence in magnetic fields

Y. Hatsugai, T. Fukui, H. Aoki

Published 2007-01-18Version 1

We discuss topological aspects of electronic properties of graphene, including edge effects, with the tight-binding model on a honeycomb lattice and its extensions to show the following: (i) Appearance of the pairn of massless Dirac dispersions, which is the origin of anomalous properties including a peculiar quantum Hall effect (QHE), is not accidental to honeycomb, but is rather generic for a class of two-dimensional lattices that interpolate between square and $\pi$-flux lattices. Persistence of the peculiar QHE is interpreted as a topological stability. (ii) While we have the massless Dirac dispersion only around E=0, the anomalous QHE associated with the Dirac cone unexpectedly persists for a wide range of the chemical potential. The range is bounded by van Hove singularities, at which we predict a transition to the ordinary fermion behavior acompanied by huge jumps in the QHE with a sign change. (iii) For edges we establish a coincidence between the quantum Hall effect in the bulk and the quantum Hall effect for the edge states, which is a manifestation of the topological bulk-edge correspondence. We have also explicitly shown that the E=0 edge states in honeycomb in zero magnetic field persist in magnetic field.