Generalization of Chiral Symmetry for Tilted Dirac Cones

Abstract: The notion of chiral symmetry for the conventional Dirac cone is generalized to include the tilted Dirac cones, where the generalized chiral operator turns out to be non-hermitian. It is shown that the generalized chiral symmetry generically protects the zero modes (n=0 Landau level) of the Dirac cone even when tilted. The present generalized symmetry is equivalent to the condition that the Dirac Hamiltonian is elliptic as a differential operator, which provides an explicit relevance to the index theorem.