Unconventional transport properties in systems with triply degenerate quadratic band crossings

Abstract

A quadratic band crossing (QBC) is a crossing of two bands with quadratic dispersion, which has been intensively investigated due to its appearance in Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene. Here, we study an extension of QBCs, the triply degenerate quadratic band crossing (TQBC), which is a three-band crossing node containing two quadratic dispersing bands and a flat band. We focus on two types of TQBCs. The first type contains a symmetry-protected QBC and a free-electron band, the prototype of which is the AA-stacked bilayer squareoctagon lattice. In a magnetic field, such a TQBC exhibits an anomalous Landau level structure, leading to a distinctive quantum Hall effect which displays an infinite ladder of Hall plateaus when the chemical potential approaches zero. The other type of TQBC can be viewed as a pseudospin-1 extension of the bilayer-graphene QBC. Under perturbations, this type of TQBCs may split into linear pseudospin-1 Dirac-Weyl fermions. When tunneling through a potential barrier, the transmission probability of the first type decays exponentially with the barrier width for any incident angle, similar to the free-electron case, while the second type hosts an all-angle perfect reflection when the energy of the incident particles is equal to half the barrier height.