Kane-Like Electrons in Type II/III Heterostructures versus Dirac-Like Electrons in Graphene

TL;DR

This paper compares charge carrier propagation in graphene and type II/III heterostructures, highlighting that their behaviors differ due to fundamental dispersion relations, with similarities only in zero-bandgap superlattices.

Contribution

It clarifies the conditions under which Kane-like and Dirac-like carriers exhibit similar behaviors, emphasizing the role of linear dispersion in graphene.

Findings

Graphene's key property is linear dispersion, not spinor wavefunctions.

Kane-like and Dirac-like carriers differ in finite-gap semiconductors.

Similar behavior occurs only in zero-bandgap superlattices.

Abstract

The propagation of charge carriers in graphene is compared to that in type II/III heterostructures for which a two-band Kane model is appropriate. In particular, conditions for a quantitative analogy between these two cases are searched for, and found to be quite restrictive. The analysis in this paper shows that the essential property of graphene is not the spinor character of its wavefunction but the linear dispersion relation, which does not hold in finite-gap two-band Kane-type semiconductors. Therefore, Kane-like and Dirac-like charge carriers behave differently, except in zero-bandgap semiconductor superlattices.