Thermal effect on the anomaly-induced electromechanical response in gapped graphene

Abstract

Mechanical deformation of gapped graphene can act on Dirac quasiparticles as an emergent gauge field. When this deformation field couples to the same current as the electromagnetic field, the parity anomaly produces a mixed electromechanical Chern-Simons response: a phonon electric field drives a transverse electrical current, and a phonon magnetic field binds charge. Previous zero-temperature results predict a sharp change in the response when the chemical potential crosses the band edge. We show that finite temperature replaces this sharp feature by a universal smooth crossover controlled only by the ratios of temperature, gap, and chemical potential. The response remains almost quantized in the insulating regime, is rounded over a gate window of order temperature near the band edge, and approaches the doped Berry-curvature result with a controlled Sommerfeld correction. We apply the result to two experimentally useful drives: a traveling flexural wave, which produces a transverse second-harmonic current, and a dynamic phonon mixed with a static ripple, which produces a fundamental-frequency signal. The same gate-temperature line shape controls both signals. This gives a direct way to separate the anomaly-induced current from ordinary electromechanical backgrounds and to extract the effective gap and electronic temperature in graphene devices.

7 pages, 5 figures