Kane-like electrons in type II/III heterostructures versus Dirac-like electrons in graphene

The propagation of charge carriers in graphene is compared to that in type II/III heterostructures for which a two-band Kane model is appropriate. In particular, conditions for a quantitative analogy between these two cases are searched for and found to be quite restrictive. The analysis in this paper shows that the essential property of graphene is not the spinor character of its wave function but the linear dispersion relation, which does not hold in finite-gap two-band Kane-type semiconductors. Therefore, Kane-like and Dirac-like charge carriers behave differently, except in zero-band gap semiconductor superlattices. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3503400]