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. 2011 Dec 6;2:575. doi: 10.1038/ncomms1586

Figure 4. Massless Dirac character of surface fermions.

Figure 4

Main panel: Landau level index N versus 1/B plotted for selected values of gate voltage, corresponding to different concentrations of holes (red symbols) and electrons (blue symbols). According to the relation characteristic for massless Dirac fermions, Inline graphic, where n is the density of charge carriers (electrons or holes), whereas for normal fermions Inline graphic. Therefore, looking at how N extrapolates for Inline graphic allows us to discriminate between massless Dirac and normal fermions. The continuous lines are linear least square fits to the data Inline graphic. They show that as Inline graphic,N extrapolates to close to −1/2 as expected for massless Dirac fermions. The inset shows the extrapolation value (b) obtained by least square fitting for ~20 different values of gate voltage (in the region with Vg in between ~−40 and +15 V, the oscillations are not sufficiently pronounced to perform the analysis). The data show that b fluctuates close to −1/2 (and not around 0). Consistently, the average of b over gate voltage is ‹b›=−0.4±0.1.