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Publications

Energy levels of ABC-stacked trilayer graphene quantum dots with infinite-mass boundary conditions

M. Mirzakhani, M. Zarenia, D. R. da Costa, S. A. Ketabi, and F. M. Peeters

Phys. Rev. B 94, 165423

2016

arXiv.org
Acess article

Abstract

Using the continuum model, we investigate the confined states and the corresponding wave functions of ABC-stacked trilayer graphene (TLG) quantum dots (QDs). First, a general infinite-mass boundary condition is derived and applied to calculate the electron and hole energy levels of a circular QD in both the absence and presence of a perpendicular magnetic field. Our analytical results for the energy spectra agree with those obtained by using the tight-binding model, where a TLG QD is surrounded by a staggered potential. Our findings show that (i) the energy spectrum exhibits intervalley symmetry $E_eK(m)=−E_h K′(m)$ for the electron (e) and hole (h) states, where m is the angular momentum quantum number, (ii) the zero-energy Landau level (LL) is formed by the magnetic states with m⩽0 for both Dirac valleys, that is different from monolayer and bilayer graphene QD with infinite-mass potential in which only one of the cones contributes, and (iii) groups of three quantum Hall edge states in the tight-binding magnetic spectrum approach the zero LL, which results from the layer symmetry in TLG QDs.

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