Effect of surface hydrogenation on the topological properties of multilayer graphene

Abstract

We have investigated effects of surface hydrogenation on the topological properties of multilayer graphene by using density functional theory calculations and a tight-binding model. Hydrogen adsorption on a dimer site of a surface layer decouples the surface layer from the rest of the layers. Hydrogen adsorption on a nondimer site introduces a band mixing between the hydrogenated graphene and the rest of the graphene layers. The valley Hall effects and spin-valley-resolved Chern numbers of multilayer graphene, calculated as a function of the sublattice potential and the potential perpendicular to the layers, was found to be sensitive to details of inversion symmetry-breaking potentials. While the topological invariant depends on the adsorption site and spin polarization, surface-hydrogenated M-layer graphene was found to be topologically equivalent to (M-1)-layer graphene under inversion symmetry-breaking potentials regardless of the adsorption site.