Electronic Structure of Multilayer Graphene 3

The recent explosion1), 2) of research on the electronic properties of single layer and stacked multilayer graphene sheets has been driven by advances in material preparation methods,3), 4) by the unusual5), 6), 7) electronic properties of these materials including unusual quantum Hall effects,8), 9) and by hopes that these elegantly tunable systems might be useful electronic materials. In this paper,10) we study the electronic structure of arbitrarily stacked multilayer graphene using a π-orbital continuum model with only near-neighbor interactions, analyzing its low-energy spectrum using degenerate state perturbation theory. Here we focus solely on aligned multilayer graphene without rotational stacking faults.11) Interestingly, we find that the low-energy effective theory of multilayer graphene is always described by a set of chiral pseudospin doublets with a conserved chirality sum. We discuss implications of this finding for the quantum Hall effect in multilayer graphene.