Graphene, a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon, has drawn much attention since its first experimental isolation. Much of this fascination stems from its exotic low-energy dynamics that is governed by the “Dirac equation”, a quantum mechanical law of motion that was originally discovered for relativistic particles such as neutrinos. Unlike for real neutrinos, however, the Dirac equation for electrons in graphene is generically massless. In this talk I will discuss how a mass term can be induced in the material and what the consequences of such mass are. Unlike the situation for real, relativistic particles, the mass for the charge carriers in graphene can be space-dependent. I will discuss the manifestations of this exotic property for the electrical characteristics of the material.
In 2003 Markus Kindermann received a PhD in Physics from the University of Leiden. For three years he then did postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Cornell University before joining in 2006 the School of Physics of the Georgia Institute of Technology. There he is an associate professor and he does research in the area of condensed matter theory with a focus on the physics of electronic nanostructures and quantum information science.