Degeneracy in carbon nanotubes under transverse magnetic δ-fields

J Phys Condens Matter. 2015 Jul 22;27(28):285501. doi: 10.1088/0953-8984/27/28/285501. Epub 2015 Jun 23.

Abstract

The aim of this article was to study the degeneracy of the energy spectrum in a nanotube under a transverse magnetic field. The massless Dirac-Weyl equation has been used to describe the low energy states of this system. The particular case of a singular magnetic field approximated by Dirac delta distributions is considered. It is shown that, under general symmetry conditions, there is a double degeneracy corresponding to periodic solutions with null axial momentum k(z)=0. Also, there may be a kind of sporadic degeneracy for non-vanishing values of k(z), which are explicitly computed in the present example. The proof of these properties is obtained by means of the supersymmetric structure of the Dirac-Weyl Hamiltonian.