Asymmetry-enriched electronic and optical properties of bilayer graphene.

The electronic and optical response of Bernal stacked bilayer graphene with geometry modulation and gate voltage are studied. The broken symmetry in sublattices, one dimensional periodicity perpendicular to the domain wall and out-of-plane axis introduces substantial changes of wavefunctions, such as gapless topological protected states, standing waves with bonding and anti-bonding characteristics, rich structures in density of states and optical spectra. The wavefunctions present well-behaved standing waves in pure system and complicated node structures in geometry-modulated system. The optical absorption spectra show forbidden optical excitation channels, prominent asymmetric absorption peaks, and dramatic variations in absorption structures. These results provide that the geometry-modulated structure with tunable gate voltage could be used for electronic and optical manipulation in future graphene-based devices.

Current response of a topological insulator to a static Zeeman field.

We study the magnetoelectric coupling at the surface of a topological insulator. We are particularly interested in the surface current induced by a static Zeeman/exchange field. This surface current can be related to the orbital magnetization of the system. For an insulator with zero Chern number, the orbital magnetization is independent of the details at the boundary. With the appearance of surface states in the topological insulator, it is not immediately obvious if the response is affected by the conditions at the surface. We investigate this question using exact diagonalization to a lattice model. By applying a time-reversal symmetry-breaking term near the boundary, even if the surface states are gapped out, we still find no change in the surface current. This arises from cancelations between Pauli and Van Vleck contributions between surface and bulk scattering states. We also show that the surface current response is independent of the chemical potential when it is within the bulk gap. Our results are consistent with the claim that orbital magnetization is a bulk property.

Persistent currents in a graphene ring with armchair edges.

A graphene nanoribbon with armchair edges is known to have no edge state. However, if the nanoribbon is in the quantum spin Hall state, then there must be helical edge states. By folding a graphene ribbon into a ring and threading it by a magnetic flux, we study the persistent charge and spin currents in the tight-binding limit. It is found that, for a broad ribbon, the edge spin current approaches a finite value independent of the radius of the ring. For a narrow ribbon, inter-edge coupling between the edge states could open the Dirac gap and reduce the overall persistent currents. Furthermore, by enhancing the Rashba coupling, we find that the persistent spin current gradually reduces to zero at a critical value beyond which the graphene is no longer a quantum spin Hall insulator.