Generation of pure bulk valley current in graphene

Abstract

The generation of valley current is a fundamental goal in graphene valleytronics but no practical ways of its realization are known yet. We propose a workable scheme for the generation of bulk valley current in a graphene mechanical resonator through adiabatic cyclic deformations of the strains and a chemical potential in the suspended region. The accompanied strain gauge fields can break the spatial mirror symmetry of the problem within each of the two inequivalent valleys, leading to a finite valley current due to quantum pumping. An all-electrical measurement configuration is designed to detect the novel state with pure bulk valley currents. © 2013 American Physical Society.