title: Dirac fermions in strongly bound graphene systems.
abstract: It is highly desirable to integrate graphene into existing semiconductor technology, where the combined system is thermodynamically stable yet maintain a Dirac cone at the Fermi level. First-principles calculations reveal that a certain transition metal (TM) intercalated graphene/SiC(0001), such as the strongly bound graphene on SiC with Mn intercalation, could be such a system. Different from freestanding graphene, the hybridization between graphene and Mn/SiC leads to the formation of a dispersive Dirac cone of primarily TM d characters. The corresponding Dirac spectrum is still isotropic, and the transport behavior is nearly identical to that of freestanding graphene for a bias as large as 0.6 V, except that the Fermi velocity is half that of graphene. A simple model Hamiltonian is developed to qualitatively account for the physics of the transfer of the Dirac cone from a dispersive system (e.g., graphene) to an originally nondispersive system (e.g., TM).
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Yuanchang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Pengcheng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Gang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Bing-Lin
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.forename: S B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Wenhui
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Duan