Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/11/2010
3:20 pm - 4:20 pm

Title: Optical Conductivity of Graphene

Speaker: Dr. Jules Carbotte, McMaster University

Institute: McMaster University

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Graphene is a single atom thick layer of carbon on a two dimensional honeycomb lattice. It was isolated for the first time in 2004 and the Nobel prize was awarded this year to Geim and Novoselov for this discovery. The charge carriers in such a two-atom per unit cell structure, with nearest neighbour hopping, behave like relativistic massless Dirac particles with a speed 1/300 the speed of light. This leads to many unusual properties including a different sequence of plateaux in the quantum Hall effect, a minimum conductance at the charge neutrality point, a nontrivial Berry phase, and a universal AC conductivity background due to the interband transitions. I will describe these and other fascinating properties of graphene.