The Nature of Quantum Hall States near the Charge Neutral Dirac Point in Graphene

We investigate the quantum Hall (QH) states near the charge neutral Dirac point of a high mobility graphene sample in high magnetic fields. We find that the QH states at filling factors $\nu =\pm 1$ depend only on the perpendicular component of the field with respect to the graphene plane, indicating them to be not spin-related. A non-linear magnetic field dependence of the activation energy gap at filling factor $\nu =1$ suggests a many-body origin. We therefore propose that the $\nu =0$ and $\pm 1$ states arise from the lifting of the spin and sub-lattice degeneracy of the $n=0$ LL, respectively.