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  • Letter

Spatial and magnetic confinement of massless Dirac fermions

Ya-Ning Ren1,*, Qiang Cheng2,3,*, Si-Yu Li1,4, Chao Yan1, Yi-Wen Liu1, Ke Lv1, Mo-Han Zhang1, Qing-Feng Sun3,5,6,†, and Lin He1,‡

  • 1Center for Advanced Quantum Studies, Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, People's Republic of China
  • 2School of Science, Qingdao University of Technology, Qingdao, Shandong 266520, China
  • 3International Center for Quantum Materials, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 4College of Materials Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, People's Republic of China
  • 5Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing 100871, China
  • 6Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, West Bld. #3, No. 10 Xibeiwang East Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100193, China

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †sunqf@pku.edu.cn
  • ‡helin@bnu.edu.cn

Phys. Rev. B 104, L161408 – Published 29 October, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.104.L161408

Abstract

The massless Dirac fermions and the ease to introduce spatial and magnetic confinement in graphene provide us unprecedented opportunity to explore confined relativistic matter in this condensed-matter system. Here we report the interplay between the confinement induced by external electric fields and magnetic fields of the massless Dirac fermions in graphene. When the magnetic length lB is larger than the characteristic length of the confined electric potential lV, the spatial confinement dominates and a relatively small critical magnetic field splits the spatial-confinement induced atomiclike shell states by switching on a π Berry phase of the quasiparticles. When the lB becomes smaller than the lV, the transition from spatial confinement to magnetic confinement occurs and the atomiclike shell states condense into Landau levels (LLs) of the Fock-Darwin states in graphene. Our experiment demonstrates that the spatial confinement dramatically changes the energy spacing between the LLs and generates large electron-hole asymmetry of the energy spacing between the LLs. These results shed light on puzzling observations in previous experiments, which hitherto remained unaddressed.

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