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Title: Asymmetric valley-resolved beam splitting and incident modes in slanted graphene junctions

Journal Article · · Applied Physics Letters
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4940684· OSTI ID:22489329
;  [1]
  1. Department of Electrophysics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan (China)

Electron injection into a graphene sheet through a slanted armchair graphene nanoribbon (AGNR) is investigated. An incident mode, or subband, in the AGNR is valley-unpolarized. Our attention is on the valley-resolved nature of the injected electron beams and its connection to the incident mode. It is known for a normal injection that an incident mode will split symmetrically into two valley-resolved beams of equal intensity. We show, in contrast, that slanted injections result in asymmetric valley-resolved beam splitting. The most asymmetric beam splitting cases, when one of the valley-resolved beams has basically disappeared, are found and the condition derived. This is shown not due to trigonal warping because it holds even in the low incident energy regime, as long as collimation allows. These most asymmetric beam splitting cases occur at energies within an energy interval near and include the subband edge of an incident mode. The physical picture is best illustrated by a projection of the slanted AGNR subband states onto that of the 2D graphene sheet. It follows that the disappearing of a valley-resolved beam coincides with the situation that the group velocities of the projected states in the corresponding valley are in backward directions.

OSTI ID:
22489329
Journal Information:
Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 108, Issue 3; Other Information: (c) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0003-6951
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English