Paper detail

Valley-driven Zitterbewegung in Kekulé-distorted graphene

Graphene deposited on top of a Copper(111) substrate may develop a Y-shaped Kekulé bond texture (Kekulé-Y), locking the momentum of its Dirac fermions with its valley degree of freedom. As a consequence, the valley degeneracy of its band structure is broken, generating an energy dispersion with two nested Dirac cones with different Fermi velocities. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of electronic wave packets in the Kekulé-Y superlattice. We show that, as a result of the valley-momentum coupling, a valley-driven oscillatory motion of the wave packets ({\it Zitterbewegung}) could appear, but with a smaller frequency than the {\it Zitterbewegung} effect found pristine graphene. This makes Kekulé-Y graphene a compelling candidate for experimental observation of {\it Zitterbewegung} phenomenon in a two-dimensional system.