English

A two-dimensional semiconductor-semimetal drag hybrid

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2025-03-04 v1

Abstract

Lateral charge transport of a two-dimensional (2D) electronic system can be much influenced by feeding a current into another closely spaced 2D conductor, known as the Coulomb drag phenomenon -- a powerful probe of electron-electron interactions and collective excitations. Yet the materials compatible for such investigations remain limited to date. Especially, gapped 2D semiconductors with inherently large correlations over a broad gate range have been rarely accessible at low temperatures. Here, we show the emergence of a large drag response (drag resistance RdragR_{\text{drag}} at the order of kΩ\Omega, with a passive-to-active drag ratio up to \sim 0.6) in a semiconductor-semimetal hybrid, realized in a graphene-MoS2_{2} heterostructure isolated by an ultrathin 3 nm hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) dielectric. We observe a crossover of TT to T2T^{2} dependence of RdragR_{\text{drag}}, separated by a characteristic temperature TdEF/kFdT_{d} \sim E_{F}/k_{F}d (dd being the interlayer distance), in echo with the presence of a metal-insulator transition in the semiconducting MoS2_{2}. Interestingly, the current nanostructure allows the decoupling of intralayer interaction-driven drag response by varying density in one layer with that in the other layer kept constant. A large Wigner-Seitz radius rsr_{s} (>> 10 within the density range of 1 to 4×1012 cm24 \times 10^{12}~\mathrm{cm}^{-2}) in the massive Schr\"odinger carriers in MoS2_{2} is thus identified to dominate the quadratic dependence of total carriers in the drag system, while the massless Dirac carriers in graphene induce negligible drag responses as a function of carrier density. Our findings establish semiconductor-semimetal hybrid as a platform for studying unique interaction physics in Coulomb drag systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.00777,
  title  = {A two-dimensional semiconductor-semimetal drag hybrid},
  author = {Yingjia Liu and Kaining Yang and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Wencai Ren and Zheng Vitto Han and Siwen Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.00777},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:03:29.007Z