Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

Electrons in graphene at the Fermi level have chirality or handedness that arises from the honeycomb structure in real space. This chirality is responsible for many of the fascinating electronic properties of graphene such as Klein tunneling. In this talk, I will describe two related scanning tunneling microscopy experiments that probe the chiral nature of the electronic states in graphene. First, I will describe an experiment where we observe the chiral symmetry of graphene to be broken, resulting in a bond-ordered phase called Kekule order. I will show that this new phase in monolayer graphene can be induced by adatoms on the surface of graphene which interact electronically with each other. In a related experiment, I will describe the electronic structure of graphene in the presence of a circular potential well that separates the sheet into p (hole) and n (electron) doped regions. Electrons in these wells spend a finite amount of time before transitioning out of the well, resulting in quasibound states that can be measured in scanning tunneling spectroscopy. Due to the chirality of the electrons in graphene, the transition probabilities at the p-n junction are governed by the physics of Klein tunneling, which can be understood from the details of the energies and wavefunctions of the quasibound states observed in experiment.