Observation of Landau levels in potassium-intercalated graphite under a zero magnetic field

Abstract

The charge carriers in graphene are massless Dirac fermions and exhibit a relativistic Landau-level quantization in a magnetic field. Recently, it has been reported that, without any external magnetic field, quantized energy levels have been also observed from strained graphene nanobubbles on a platinum surface, which were attributed to the Landau levels of massless Dirac fermions in graphene formed by a strain-induced pseudomagnetic field. Here we show the generation of the Landau levels of massless Dirac fermions on a partially potassium-intercalated graphite surface without applying external magnetic field. Landau levels of massless Dirac fermions indicate the graphene character in partially potassium-intercalated graphite. The generation of the Landau levels is ascribed to a vector potential induced by the perturbation of nearest-neighbour hopping, which may originate from a strain or a gradient of on-site potentials at the perimeters of potassium-free domains.