Generalized effective hamiltonian for graphene under non-uniform strain

Understand

We use a symmetry approach to construct a systematic derivative expansion of the low energy effective Hamiltonian modifying the continuum Dirac description of graphene in the presence of non-uniform elastic deformations.

• We extract all experimentally relevant terms and describe their physical significance.
• Among them there is a new gap-opening term that describes the Zeeman coupling of the elastic pseudomagnetic field and the pseudospin.
• We determine the value of the couplings using a generalized tight binding model.