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Published on: September 26, 2014
Accidental degeneracy of double Dirac cones in a phononic crystal
Ze-Guo Chen1, Xu Ni1, Ying Wu2
1National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures & Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Artificial honeycomb lattices with Dirac cone dispersion provide a macroscopic platform to study the massless Dirac quasiparticles and their novel geometric phases. In this paper, a quadruple-degenerate state is achieved at the center of the Brillouin zone in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice phononic crystal, which is a result of accidental degeneracy of two double-degenerate states. In the vicinity of the quadruple-degenerate state, the dispersion relation is linear. Such quadruple degeneracy is analyzed by rigorous representation theory of groups. Using k·p method, a reduced Hamiltonian is obtained to describe the linear Dirac dispersion relations of this quadruple-degenerate state, which is well consistent with the simulation results. Near such accidental degeneracy, we observe some unique properties in wave propagating, such as defect-insensitive propagating character and the Talbot effect.
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