Graphene-like massless Dirac fermions in Harper systems

It is shown that systems described by Harper's equation exhibit a Dirac point at the center of the spectrum whenever the field parameter is a fraction of even denominator. The Dirac point is formed by the touching of two subbands, and the physics around such point is characterized by the relative field only, as if the latter were null at the reference value. Such behavior is consistent with the nesting property conjectured by Hofstadter, and its experimental verification would give support to such hypothesis as well as the Peierls-Onsager ansatz used to arrive at Harper's equation when crystalline electrons move in a uniform external magnetic field