In-plane electric polarization of bilayer graphene nanoribbons by interlayer bias voltage

We theoretically show that an interlayer bias voltage in the AB-stacked bilayer graphene nanoribbons with armchair edges induces an electric polarization along the ribbon. Both tight-binding and ab initio calculations consistently indicate that when the bias voltage is weak, the polarization shows opposite signs depending on the ribbon width modulo three. This nontrivial dependence is explained using a two-band effective model. A strong limit of the bias voltage in the tight-binding model shows either one-third or zero polarization, which agrees with topological argument.
Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted by PRL