Manipulation of the Dirac cones and the anomaly in the graphene related quantum Hall effect

Abstract

The quantum Hall effect in graphene is regarded to be involving half-integer topological numbers associated with the massless Dirac particle, this is usually not apparent due to the doubling of the Dirac cones. Here we theoretically consider two classes of lattice models in which we manipulate the Dirac cones with either (a) two Dirac points that have mutually different energies, or (b) multiple Dirac cones having different Fermi velocities. We have shown, with an explicit calculation of the topological (Chern) number for case (a) and with an adiabatic argument for case (b) that the results are consistent with the picture that a single Dirac fermion contributes the half-odd integer series (... -3/2, -1/2, 1/2, 3/2, ...) to the Hall conductivity when the Fermi energy traverses the Landau levels.