Landau quantization in graphene monolayer, Bernal bilayer, and Bernal trilayer on graphite surface

Electronic properties of surface areas decoupled from graphite are studied using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. We show that it is possible to identify the decoupled graphene monolayer, the Bernal bilayer, and the Bernal trilayer on a graphite substrate according to their tunneling spectra in a high magnetic field. The decoupled monolayer and bilayer exhibit Landau quantization of massless and massive Dirac fermions, respectively. The substrate generates a sizable band gap ∼35 meV in the Bernal bilayer, therefore, the eightfold degenerate Landau level at the charge neutrality point is split into two valley-polarized quartets polarized on each layer. In the decoupled Bernal trilayer, we find that both massless and massive Dirac fermions coexist and its low-energy band structure can be described quite well by taking into account only the nearest-neighbor intra- and interlayer hopping parameters. A strong correlation between the Fermi velocity of the massless Dirac fermions and the effective mass of the massive Dirac fermions is observed in the graphene trilayer. Our result demonstrates that the surface of graphite provides a natural ideal platform to probe the electronic spectra of graphene layers.