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Phys. Rev. B 79, 241406(R) (2009) [4 pages]

Engineering artificial graphene in a two-dimensional electron gas

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Marco Gibertini, Achintya Singha, Vittorio Pellegrini, and Marco Polini*
NEST-CNR-INFM and Scuola Normale Superiore, I-56126 Pisa, Italy

Giovanni Vignale
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA

Aron Pinczuk
Department of Physics and Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York 10027, USA

Loren N. Pfeiffer and Ken W. West†
Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent Inc., Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA

Received 27 April 2009; published 29 June 2009

See accompanying Physics Synopsis

At low energy, electrons in doped graphene sheets behave like massless Dirac fermions with a Fermi velocity, which does not depend on carrier density. Here we show that modulating a two-dimensional electron gas with a long-wavelength periodic potential with honeycomb symmetry can lead to the creation of isolated massless Dirac points with tunable Fermi velocity. We provide detailed theoretical estimates to realize such artificial graphenelike system and discuss an experimental realization in a modulation-doped GaAs quantum well. Ultrahigh-mobility electrons with linearly dispersing bands might open new venues for the studies of Dirac-fermion physics in semiconductors.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.79.241406
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.79.241406
PACS:
73.21.Fg, 78.67.De

*m.polini@sns.it

†Present address: Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

 
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