Strain-induced pseudomagnetic field and quantum oscillations in kagome crystals

Abstract

A kagome lattice is composed of corner-sharing triangles arranged on a honeycomb lattice such that each honeycomb bond hosts a kagome site while each kagome triangle encloses a honeycomb site. Such close relation implies that the two lattices share common features. We predict here that a kagome crystal, similar to the honeycomb lattice graphene, reacts to elastic strain in a unique way that the bulk electronic states in the vicinity of Dirac points are reorganized by the strain-induced pseudomagnetic field into pseudo-Landau levels, while the degenerate edge states in the undeformed crystal become separated in the energy dimension. When the strain is tuned continuously, the resulting scanning pseudomagnetic field gives rise to quantum oscillations in both the density of states and the electrical conductivity.