Curved-space Dirac description of elastically deformed monolayer graphene is generally incorrect

Abstract

Undistorted monolayer graphene has energy bands which cross at protected Dirac points. It elastically deforms, and much research has assumed the Dirac description persists, now in a curved space and coupled to a gauge field related to lattice strain. We show this is incorrect by using a real space gradient expansion to study how the Dirac equation derives from the tight-binding model. Generic spatially varying hopping functions give rise to large magnetic fields which spoil the truncation in derivatives. In the perturbative regime, the only consistent truncation to Dirac is one with nontrivial gauge field but in flat space. One can instead fine-tune the magnetic field to be small, and we derive the resulting differential condition that the hopping functions must satisfy to yield a consistent truncation to Dirac in curved space. We consider whether mechanical effects might impose this fine tuning but find this is not the case for a simple elastic membrane model.