Trapping massless Dirac particles in a rotating saddle
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Published on: March 30, 2017
1Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden.
Abstract:
We consider particles moving in rotating saddle-shaped potentials in two dimensions. It is known that such rotating potentials can generate bounded motion for particles with a parabolic dispersion law through the combination of potential, centrifugal, and Coriolis forces in the rotating frame. When applied to massless Dirac particles, for example, electrons in graphene, such a potential is shown to lead to eigenstates that are spatially localized near the center of the saddle at certain energies. Although other states also exist at these energies, they have nonoverlapping support in the oscillator basis, which also tends to give the localized states a substantial lifetime when imperfections are present.
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