Intrinsic resistance peaks in AB-stacked multilayer graphene with odd number of layers

Abstract

We studied the band structure of AB-stacked multilayer graphene with odd numbers of layers by conducting experiments to measure resistance ridge structures which were recently found to appear in the plot of the resistance with respect to a carrier density and a perpendicular electric flux density. The resistance ridges were found to exhibit qualitatively different structure depending on the parity of the number of layers, which determines the presence or absence of a monolayerlike band. In the perpendicular electric field, pairs of nearly flat bands (or heavy mass band) are formed at the bottoms of bilayerlike band because of the formation of the energy gap, and result in the split resistance ridge structures in the even numbers of layers. However, a monolayerlike band, which is present in AB-stacked graphene with odd numbers of layers, hybridizes with the bilayerlike bands; number of nearly flat bands, and thus, the number of resistance ridges, reduced as compared with the case of AB-stacked graphene with even numbers of layers. The mixing also opened an energy gap at the bottom of the monolayerlike band. The resistance ridge provides detailed information on the dispersion relation in multilayer graphene.