We study the symmetry classes of graphene quantum dots, both open and closed, through the conductance and energy level statistics. For abrupt termination of the lattice, these properties are well described by the standard orthogonal and unitary ensembles. However, for smooth mass confinement, special time-reversal symmetries associated with the sublattice and valley degrees of freedom are critical: they lead to block diagonal Hamiltonians and scattering matrices with blocks belonging to the unitary symmetry class even at zero magnetic field. While the effect of this structure is clearly seen in the conductance of open dots, it is suppressed in the spectral statistics of closed dots, because the intervalley scattering time is shorter than the time required to resolve a level spacing in the closed systems but longer than the escape time of the open systems.
We study the influence of different edge types on the electronic density of states of graphene nanostructures. To this end we develop an exact expansion for the single-particle Green's function of ballistic graphene structures in terms of multiple reflections from the system boundary, which allows for a natural treatment of edge effects. We first apply this formalism to calculate the average density of states of graphene billiards. While the leading term in the corresponding Weyl expansion is proportional to the billiard area, we find that the contribution that usually scales with the total length of the system boundary differs significantly from what one finds in semiconductor-based, Schrödinger-type billiards: The latter term vanishes for armchair and infinite-mass edges and is proportional to the zigzag edge length, highlighting the prominent role of zigzag edges in graphene. We then compute analytical expressions for the density of states oscillations and energy levels within a trajectory-based semiclassical approach. We derive a Dirac version of Gutzwiller's trace formula for classically chaotic graphene billiards and further obtain semiclassical trace formulas for the density of states oscillations in regular graphene cavities. We find that edge-dependent interference of pseudospins in graphene crucially affects the quantum spectrum.
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