Honeycomb Lattice Potentials and Dirac Points

We prove that the two-dimensional Schroedinger operator with a potential having the symmetry of a honeycomb structure has dispersion surfaces with conical singularities (Dirac points) at the vertices of its Brillouin zone. No assumptions are made on the size of the potential. We then prove the robustness of such conical singularities to a restrictive class of perturbations, which break the honeycomb lattice symmetry. General small perturbations of potentials with Dirac points do not have Dirac points; their dispersion surfaces are smooth. The presence of Dirac points in honeycomb structures is associated with many novel electronic and optical properties of materials such as graphene.Comment: To appear in Journal of the American Mathematical Society; 54 pages, 2 figures [note: earlier replacement was original version

Geometric Analysis of Bifurcation and Symmetry Breaking in a Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Gross-Pitaevskii and nonlinear Hartree equations are equations of nonlinear Schroedinger type, which play an important role in the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation. Recent results of Aschenbacher et. al. [AFGST] demonstrate, for a class of 3- dimensional models, that for large boson number (squared L^2 norm), N, the ground state does not have the symmetry properties as the ground state at small N. We present a detailed global study of the symmetry breaking bifurcation for a 1-dimensional model Gross-Pitaevskii equation, in which the external potential (boson trap) is an attractive double-well, consisting of two attractive Dirac delta functions concentrated at distinct points. Using dynamical systems methods, we present a geometric analysis of the symmetry breaking bifurcation of an asymmetric ground state and the exchange of dynamical stability from the symmetric branch to the asymmetric branch at the bifurcation point.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Wave packets in Honeycomb Structures and Two-Dimensional Dirac Equations

In a recent article [10], the authors proved that the non-relativistic Schr\"odinger operator with a generic honeycomb lattice potential has conical (Dirac) points in its dispersion surfaces. These conical points occur for quasi-momenta, which are located at the vertices of the Brillouin zone, a regular hexagon. In this paper, we study the time-evolution of wave-packets, which are spectrally concentrated near such conical points. We prove that the large, but finite, time dynamics is governed by the two-dimensional Dirac equations.Comment: 34 pages, 2 figure