Landau Level Collapse in Gated Graphene Structures

We describe a new regime of magnetotransport in two dimensional electron systems in the presence of a narrow potential barrier imposed by external gates. In such systems, the Landau level states, confined to the barrier region in strong magnetic fields, undergo a deconfinement transition as the field is lowered. We present transport measurements showing Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations which, in the unipolar regime, abruptly disappear when the strength of the magnetic field is reduced below a certain critical value. This behavior is explained by a semiclassical analysis of the transformation of closed cyclotron orbits into open, deconfined trajectories. Comparison to SdH-type resonances in the local density of states is presented.