Anomalous Floquet tunneling in uniaxially strained graphene

TL;DR

This paper explores how uniaxial strain combined with time-periodic potentials in graphene leads to anomalous electron tunneling behaviors, enabling tunable control over photon-assisted transport phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of anomalous Floquet tunneling in strained graphene, demonstrating how strain and periodic potentials influence electron transmission in novel ways.

Findings

Angular shift of maximum transmission in sidebands due to strain

Transmission depends on barrier width, incident angle, and strain

Modulation of barrier parameters controls sideband transmission

Abstract

The interplay of strain engineering and photon-assisted tunneling of electrons in graphene is considered for giving rise to atypical transport phenomena. The combination of uniaxial strain and a time-periodic potential barrier helps to control the particle transmission for a wide range of tunable parameters. With the use of the tight-biding approach, the elasticity theory, and the Floquet scattering, we found an angular shift of the maximum transmission in the sidebands for uniaxial strains breaking the mirror symmetry with respect to the normal incidence, which is called anomalous Floquet tunneling. We show that electron tunneling depends strongly on the barrier width, incident angle, uniaxial strain, and the tuning of the time-periodic potential parameters. An adequate modulation of the barrier width and oscillation amplitude serves to select the transmission in the sidebands. These findings can be useful for controlling the electron current through the photon-assisted tunneling being used in multiple nanotechnological applications.