Anomalous caustics and Veselago focusing in 8-Pmmn borophene p–n junctions with arbitrary junction directions

Abstract

Negative refraction usually demands complex structure engineering while it is very natural for massless Dirac fermions (MDFs) across the p–n junction (PNJ), this leads to Dirac electron optics. The emergent Dirac materials may exhibit hitherto unidentified phenomenon due to their nontrivial band structures in contrast to the isotropic MDFs in graphene. Here, as a specific example, we explore the negative refraction induced caustics and Veselago focusing of tilted MDFs across 8-Pmmn borophene PNJs. To this aim, we develop a technique to effectively construct the electronic Green’s function (GF) in PNJs with arbitrary junction directions. Based on analytical discussions and numerical calculations, we demonstrate the strong dependence of interference pattern on the junction direction. As the junction direction perpendicular to the tilt direction, Veselago focusing or normal caustics (similar to that in graphene) appears resting on the doping configuration of the PNJs, otherwise anomalous caustics (different from that in graphene) occurs which is manipulated by the junction direction and the doping configuration. Finally, the developed GF technique is generally promising to uncover the unique transport of emergent MDFs, and the discovered anomalous caustics makes tilted MDFs potential applications in Dirac electron optics.