Anisotropic minimal conductivity of graphene bilayers

Abstract

Fermi line of bilayer graphene at zero energy is transformed into four separated points positioned trigonally at the corner of the hexagonal first Brillouin zone. We show that as a result of this trigonal splitting the minimal conductivity of an undoped bilayer graphene strip becomes anisotropic with respect to the orientation $\theta$ of the connected electrodes and finds a dependence on its length $L$ on the characteristic scale $\ell=\pi/\Delta k\simeq 50 nm$ determined by the inverse of k-space distance of two Dirac points. The minimum conductivity increases from a universal isotropic value $\sigma^{min}_{\bot}=(8/\pi)e^2/h$ for a short strip $L\ll \ell$ to a higher anisotropic value for longer strips, which in the limit of $L\gg \ell$ varies from $(7/3)\sigma^{min}_{\bot}$ at $\theta=0$ to $3\sigma^{min}_{\bot}$ over an angle range $\Delta \theta\sim \ell/L$.