Speaker
Roland Winkler
Description
Recently atomically flat layers of carbon known as graphene
have become the rising star in spintronics as their
electrons carry notonly the ordinary spin degree of freedom,
but they also have a pseudo-spin degree of freedom tied to
the electrons' orbital motion which could enable new routes
for spintronics.Here we focus on bilayer graphene (BLG).
Using group theory we have established a complete
description of how electrons in BLG interactwith electric
and magnetic fields. We show that electrons in BLG
experience an unusual type of matter-field interactions
where magnetic and electric fields are virtually equivalent:
every coupling of an electron's degrees of freedom to a
magnetic field is matched by an analogous coupling of the
same degrees of freedom to an electric field. This
counter-intuitive duality of matter-field interactions
allows novel ways to create and manipulate spin and
pseudo-spin polarizations via external fields that are not
available in other materials.
