Helical States in Curved Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

We study spin effects of quantum wires formed in bilayer graphene by electrostatic confinement. With a proper choice of the confinement direction, we show that in the presence of magnetic field, spin-orbit interaction induced by curvature, and intervalley scattering, bound states emerge that are helical. The localization length of these helical states can be modulated by the gate voltage which enables the control of the tunnel coupling between two parallel wires. Allowing for proximity effect via an s-wave superconductor, we show that the helical modes give rise to Majorana fermions in bilayer graphene.

References in corpus (8)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Intrinsic and Rashba Spin-orbit Interactions in Graphene Sheets
• Coupling of Spin and Orbital Motion of Electrons in Carbon Nanotubes
• Topological confinement in bilayer graphene
• Gate-controlled Guiding of Electrons in Graphene
• Spin-selective Peierls transition in interacting one-dimensional conductors with spin-orbit interaction
• Electronic Highways in Bilayer Graphene
• Transition from fractional to Majorana fermions in Rashba nanowires

Cited by in corpus (5)

• RKKY interaction in carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons
• Giant spin orbit interaction due to rotating magnetic fields in graphene nanoribbons
• Fractional Fermions with Non-Abelian Statistics
• Topological phases in gated bilayer graphene: Effects of Rashba spin-orbit coupling and exchange field
• Intrinsic and substrate induced spin-orbit interaction in chirally stacked trilayer graphene