Chiral Luttinger liquids in graphene tuned by irradiation

Abstract

We show that chiral co-propagating Luttinger liquids can be created and tuned by shining high frequency, circularly polarized light, normal to the layers, with different polarizations on two sections of bilayer graphene. By virtue of the broken time-reversal symmetry and the resulting mismatch of Chern number, the one-dimensional chiral modes are localized along the domain wall where the polarization changes. Single layer graphene hosts a single chiral edge mode near each Dirac node, whereas in bilayer graphene, there are two chiral modes near each of the Dirac nodes. These modes, under a high-frequency drive, essentially have a static charge distribution and form a chiral Luttinger liquid under Coulomb interaction, which can be tuned by means of the driving parameters. We also note that unlike the Luttinger liquids created by electrostatic confinement in bilayer graphene, here there is no back-scattering, and hence our wires along the node are stable to disorder.