Narrow-Sense Type-III Dirac Cones and Additional Flat Lines on a Honeycomb Lattice with Anisotropic Next-Nearest-Neighbor Hoppings

Abstract

Critically tilted Dirac cones have attracted considerable attention because of their unconventional electronic properties in two-dimensional massless Dirac-fermion systems. Among them, the narrow-sense type-III Dirac cone is characterized by a flat dispersion along the direction connecting the two Dirac points. Using a tight-binding model on a single-orbital honeycomb lattice, we demonstrate that narrow-sense type-III Dirac cones can be realized by tuning anisotropic next-nearest-neighbor hoppings. Type-I and type-II Dirac cones emerge on either side of the critical point, enabling a systematic investigation of the electronic properties across the type-I, narrow-sense type-III, and type-II regimes. We further find that the present model exhibits additional flat lines in momentum space whose energy coincides with the Dirac-point energy at the narrow-sense type-III critical point. This band structure produces a pronounced enhancement of the density of states at the Fermi energy and, consequently, a substantial enhancement of the electronic specific heat compared with that expected for an ideal narrow-sense type-III Dirac cone. Our results show that the honeycomb lattice with anisotropic next-nearest-neighbor hoppings provides a simple platform for exploring unconventional thermodynamic properties arising from the energy coincidence of narrow-sense type-III Dirac cones and additional flat lines at the Fermi energy.