Dynamical mass generation via space compactification in graphene

Abstract

Fermions in a graphene sheet behave like massless particles. We show that by folding the sheet into a tube they acquire non-zero effective mass as they move along the tube axis. That is, changing the space topology of graphene from 2D to 1D (space compactification) changes the 2D massless problem into an effective massive 1D problem. The size of the resulting mass spectrum depends on the quantized azimuthal frequency and its line spacing is proportional to the inverse of the tube diameter.