Chaos in the honeycomb optical-lattice unit cell.

Abstract

Natural and artificial honeycomb lattices are of great interest because the band structure of these lattices, if properly constructed, contains a Dirac point. Such lattices occur naturally in the form of graphene and carbon nanotubes. They have been created in the laboratory in the form of semiconductor 2DEGs, optical lattices, and photonic crystals. We show that, over a wide energy range, gases (of electrons, atoms, or photons) that propagate through these lattices are Lorentz gases and the corresponding classical dynamics is chaotic. Thus honeycomb lattices are also of interest for understanding eigenstate thermalization and the conductor-insulator transition due to dynamic Anderson localization.