Uniaxial strain on gapped graphene

Understand

We study the effect of uniaxial strain on the electronic band structure of gapped graphene.

• We consider two types of gapped graphene, one which breaks the symmetry between the two triangular sublattices (staggered model), and another which alternates the bonds on the honeycomb lattice (Kekul\'e model).
• In the staggered model, the effect of strains below a critical value is only a shift of the band gap location.
• In the Kekul\'e model, as strain is increased, band gap location is initially pinned to a corner of the Brillouin zone while its width diminishes, and after gap closure the location of the contact point begins to shift.