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Updated: Jun 29, 2026

Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
New generation of massless Dirac fermions in graphene under external periodic potentials
Cheol-Hwan Park1, Li Yang, Young-Woo Son
1Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. cheolhwan@civet.berkeley.edu
Abstract:
We show that new massless Dirac fermions are generated when a slowly varying periodic potential is applied to graphene. These quasiparticles, generated near the supercell Brillouin zone boundaries with anisotropic group velocity, are different from the original massless Dirac fermions. The quasiparticle wave vector (measured from the new Dirac point), the generalized pseudospin vector, and the group velocity are not collinear. We further show that with an appropriate periodic potential of triangular symmetry, there exists an energy window over which the only available states are these quasiparticles, thus providing a good system to probe experimentally the new massless Dirac fermions. The required parameters of external potentials are within the realm of laboratory conditions.
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