Symmetry-enforced nodal lines in the band structures of vacancy-engineered graphene

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that vacancy-engineered graphene with nonsymmorphic symmetry can host symmetry-enforced nodal lines in its band structure, which could enable novel electronic and spintronic device functionalities.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework showing how periodic vacancies induce nonsymmorphic symmetry, leading to symmetry-enforced nodal lines in graphene's band structure.

Findings

Nodal lines are enforced by glide plane symmetry in vacancy-engineered graphene.

Nodal lines can cross the Fermi level, enhancing the density of states.

The theory explains nodal loops observed in experimental chevron-type nanoporous graphene.

Abstract

We elaborate that single-layer graphene with periodic vacancies can have a band structure containing nodal lines or nodal loops, opening the possibility of graphene-based electronic or spintronic devices with novel functionalities. The principle is that by removing carbon atoms such that the lattice becomes nonsymmorphic, every two sublattices in the unit cell will map to each other under glide plane operation. This mapping yields degenerate eigenvalues for the glide plane operation, which guarantees that the energy bands must stick together pairwise at a boundary of the Brillouin zone. Moving away from the Brillouin zone boundary causes the symmetry-enforced nodal lines to split, resulting in accidental nodal lines caused by the crossings of the split bands. Moreover, the density of states at the Fermi level may be dramatically enhanced if the nodal lines crosses the Fermi level. The nodal lines occur a variety of vacancy configurations even in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Finally, our theory also explains the nodal loops surrounding the entire Brillouin zone of a chevron-type nanoporous graphene fabricated in a recent experiment.