Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Three "layers" of graphene monolayer and their analog generalized uncertainty principles

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2022

Abstract

We show that graphene, in its simplest form and settings, is a practical tabletop realization of the analog of exotic quantum gravity scenarios, which are speculated to lead to certain generalized Heisenberg algebras. In particular, we identify three different energy regimes (the "layers") where the physics is still of a pseudorelativistic (Dirac) type but more and more sensitive to the effects of the lattice.

This plays here a role analog to that of a discrete space, where the Dirac quasiparticles live. This work improves and pushes further earlier results, where the physical meaning of the high energy momenta was clear, but the conjugate coordinates only had a purely abstract description.

Here we find the physical meaning of the latter by identifying the mapping between the high energy coordinates and low energy ones, i.e., those measured in the lab. We then obtain two generalized Heisenberg algebras that were not noticed earlier.

In these two cases, we have the striking result that the high energy coordinates just coincide with the standard ones, measured in the lab. A third generalized Heisenberg algebra is obtained, and it is an improvement of the results obtained earlier in two respects: we now have an expression of the generalized coordinates in terms of the standard phase-space variables, and we obtain higher order terms.

All mentioned results clearly open the doors to tabletop experimental verifications of many generalized uncertainty principle-corrected predictions of the quantum gravity phenomenology.