English

Quantum Hall Effect of Massless Dirac Fermions in a Vanishing Magnetic Field

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2008-06-30 v2

Abstract

The effect of strong long-range disorder on the quantization of the Hall conductivity σxy\sigma_{xy} in graphene is studied numerically. It is shown that increasing Landau-level mixing progressively destroys all plateaus in σxy\sigma_{xy} except the plateaus at σxy=e2/2h\sigma_{xy}=\mp e^2/2h (per valley and per spin). The critical state at the charge-neutral Dirac point is robust to strong disorder and belongs to the universality class of the conventional plateau transitions in the integer quantum Hall effect. We propose that the breaking of time-reversal symmetry by ripples in graphene can realize this quantum critical point in a vanishing magnetic field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.3121,
  title  = {Quantum Hall Effect of Massless Dirac Fermions in a Vanishing Magnetic Field},
  author = {Kentaro Nomura and Shinsei Ryu and Mikito Koshino and Christopher Mudry and Akira Furusaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.3121},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures