Gauge fields from strain in graphene

We revise the tight-binding approach to strained or curved graphene in the presence of external probes such as photoemission or scanning tunneling microscopy experiments. We show that extra terms arise in the continuum limit of the tight-binding Hamiltonian which cannot be accounted for by changes in the hopping parameters due to lattice deformations, encoded in the parameter beta. These material-independent extra couplings are of the same order of magnitude as the standard ones and have a geometric origin. They include corrections to the position-dependent Fermi velocity and to a new vector field. We show that the new vector field does not couple to electrons like a standard gauge field and that no beta-independent pseudomagnetic fields exist in strained graphene. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.87.165131