The interplay of strain engineering and photon-assisted tunneling of electrons in graphene is considered for giving rise to atypical transport phenomena. The combination of uniaxial strain and a time-periodic potential barrier helps to control the particle transmission for a wide range of tunable parameters. With the use of the tight-biding approach, the elasticity theory, and the Floquet scattering, we find an angular shift of the transmission maximum in the sidebands for uniaxial strains breaking the mirror symmetry with respect to the normal incidence, which is called anomalous Floquet tunneling. This strain also modulates the transmission maximum in the sidebands and favors photoinduced currents. From Floquet scattering theory, we derive a generalized Snell's law for electrons in the presence of time-periodic potentials and uniaxial strain. We show that electron tunneling depends strongly on the barrier width, incident angle, uniaxial strain, and the tuning of the time-periodic potential parameters. An adequate modulation of the barrier width and oscillation amplitude serves to select the transmission in the sidebands. These findings can be useful for controlling the electron current through the photon-assisted tunneling being used in multiple nanotechnological applications.

• Received 30 November 2020
• Revised 28 January 2021
• Accepted 15 April 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.103.155433