Valley symmetry breaking in bilayer graphene: a test of the minimal model

Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Dec 31;103(26):266804. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.266804. Epub 2009 Dec 28.

Abstract

Physical properties reflecting the valley asymmetry of Landau levels in a biased bilayer graphene under a magnetic field are discussed. Within the 4-band continuum model with a Hartree-corrected self-consistent gap and finite damping factor we predict the appearance of anomalous steps in quantized Hall conductivity due to the degeneracy lifting of Landau levels. Moreover, the valley symmetry breaking effect appears as a nonsemiclassical de Haas-van Alphen effect where the reduction of the oscillation period to half cannot be accounted for through quasiclassical quantization of the orbits in reciprocal space.