2013/02/28 by Thomas Iadecola, David K. Campbell, David Campbell +6
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Graphene research and applications #Quantum many-body systems #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.110.176603
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 176603 (2013) · Edited version; minor corrections
openalex publication_date 2013/04/25 · arxiv created 2013/04/26 · arxiv updated 2013/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Controlling the properties of materials by driving them out of equilibrium is an exciting prospect that has only recently begun to be explored. In this Letter we give a striking theoretical example of such materials design: a tunable gap in monolayer graphene is generated by exciting a particular optical phonon. We show that the system reaches a steady state whose transport properties are the same as if the system had a static electronic gap, controllable by the driving amplitude. Moreover, the steady state displays topological phenomena: there are chiral edge currents, which circulate a fractional charge e/2 per rotation cycle, with the frequency set by the optical phonon frequency.