h-BN layer induced chiral decomposition in the electronic properties of multilayer graphene

TL;DR

This paper explores how h-BN layers induce chiral decomposition in multilayer graphene, revealing effective subsystems with modified electronic properties and analyzing phenomena like Klein tunneling.

Contribution

It introduces a decomposition method for multilayer graphene on h-BN, accounting for effective parameters including on-site potentials, which differ from pure graphene systems.

Findings

Multilayer graphene on h-BN decomposes into chiral pseudospin doublets.

Effective parameters include interlayer couplings and on-site potentials.

Klein tunneling behavior is quantitatively analyzed and compared to pure graphene.

Abstract

We discuss the chiral decomposition of non-symmetric stacking structures. It is shown that the low-energy electronic structure of Bernal stacked graphene multilayer deposited on h-BN consists of chiral pseudospin doublets. N-layer graphene stocks on h-BN layer have N/2 effective bilayer graphene systems and one effective h-BN layer if N is even or (N-1)/2 effective graphene bilayers plus one graphene monolayer modified by h-BN layer if N is odd. We present the decomposition procedure and we derive the recurrence relations for the effective parameters characterizing the chiral subsystems. The effective parameters consist in this case of the interlayer couplings and on-site potentials in contrast to pure graphene multilayer systems where only interlayer couplings are modified. We apply this procedure to discuss the Klein tunneling phenomena and compare quantitatively the results with pure graphene multilayer systems.