In graphene, the pseudospin and the valley flavor arise as new types of quantum degrees of freedom due to the honeycomb lattice comprising two sublattices (A and B) and two inequivalent Dirac points (K and K') in the Brillouin zone, respectively. Unique electronic properties of graphene result in striking phenomena such as Klein tunnelling, Veselago lens, and valley-polarized currents. Here, we investigate the roles of the pseudospin and the valley in electron scattering at graphene edges and show that they are strongly correlated with charge density modulations of short-wavelength oscillations and slowly-decaying beat patterns. Theoretical analyses using nearest-neighbor tight-binding methods and first-principles density-functional theory calculations agree well with our experimental data from the scanning tunneling microscopy. We believe that this study will lead to useful application of graphene to "valleytronics" and "pseudospintronics".
@article{arxiv.1102.1269,
title = {Pseudospin rotation and valley mixing in electron scattering at graphene edges},
author = {Changwon Park and Heejun Yang and Andrew J. Mayne and Gerald Dujardin and Sunae Seo and Young Kuk and Jisoon Ihm and Gunn Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.1269},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
13 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary Information available upon request