Valley currents and nonlocal resistances of graphene nanostructures with broken inversion symmetry are considered theoretically in the linear response regime. Scattering state wave functions of electrons entering the nanostructure from the contacts represented by groups of ideal leads are calculated by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equation and are projected onto the valley state subspaces to obtain the valley velocity fields and total valley currents in the nanostructures. In the tunneling regime when the Fermi energy is in the spectral gap around the Dirac point energy, inversion symmetry breaking is found to result in strong enhancement of the nonlocal four-terminal Büttiker-Landauer resistance and in valley currents several times stronger than the conventional electric current. These strong valley currents are the direct result of the injection of electrons from a contact into the graphene in the tunneling regime. They are chiral and occur near contacts from which electrons are injected into the nanostructure whether or not a net electric current flows through the contact. It is also pointed out that enhanced nonlocal resistances in the linear response regime are not a signature of valley currents arising from the combined effect of the electric field and Berry curvature on the velocities of electrons.

• Received 30 June 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.125425