New Dirac fermions in periodically modulated bilayer graphene.

We investigate the effect of periodic potentials on the electronic structure of bilayer graphene and show that there is a critical value of the external potential below which new Dirac fermions are generated in the low-energy band structure, and above which a band gap is opened in the system. Our results, obtained from a self-consistent tight-binding calculation, can be simply explained by a two-band continuum model as a consequence of the pseudospin physics in graphene. The findings are robust against changes in the form of the potential, as well as bias voltages between the layers.