Sublattice-induced symmetry breaking and band-gap formation in graphene

A reduction of symmetry from C6v to C3v leads to the opening of a band gap in the otherwise gapless semiconductor graphene. Simple models provide a fairly complete picture of this mechanism for opening a band gap and in fact can be discussed in terms of the tight-binding approximation, accurately resolving the wave-vector space to a very high accuracy. This picture is consistent with experiments that yield a band gap due to A and B graphene-site symmetry breaking due to substrate interactions.