Resonant valley filtering of massive Dirac electrons

Abstract

Electrons in graphene, in addition to their spin, have two pseudospin degrees of freedom: sublattice and valley pseudospin. Valleytronics uses the valley degree of freedom as a carrier of information similarly to the way spintronics uses electron spin. We show how a double-barrier structure consisting of electric and vector potentials can be used to filter massive Dirac electrons based on their valley index. We study the resonant transmission through a finite number of barriers and we obtain the energy spectrum of a superlattice consisting of electric and vector potentials. When a mass term is included, the energy bands and energy gaps at the $K$ and ${K}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ points are different and they can be tuned by changing the potential.