English

Composite super-moir\'e lattices in double aligned graphene heterostructures

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2019-12-30 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

When two-dimensional atomic crystals are brought into close proximity to form a van der Waals heterostructure, neighbouring crystals can start influencing each others electronic properties. Of particular interest is the situation when the periodicity of the two crystals closely match and a moir\'e pattern forms, which results in specific electron scattering, reconstruction of electronic and excitonic spectra, crystal reconstruction, and many other effects. Thus, formation of moir\'e patterns is a viable tool of controlling the electronic properties of 2D materials. At the same time, the difference in the interatomic distances for the two crystals combined, determines the range in which the electronic spectrum is reconstructed, and thus is a barrier to the low energy regime. Here we present a way which allows spectrum reconstruction at all energies. By using graphene which is aligned simultaneously to two hexagonal boron nitride layers, one can make electrons scatter in the differential moir\'e pattern, which can have arbitrarily small wavevector and, thus results in spectrum reconstruction at arbitrarily low energies. We demonstrate that the strength of such a potential relies crucially on the atomic reconstruction of graphene within the differential moir\'e super-cell. Such structures offer further opportunity in tuning the electronic spectra of two-dimensional materials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.12268,
  title  = {Composite super-moir\'e lattices in double aligned graphene heterostructures},
  author = {Zihao Wang and Yi Bo Wang and J. Yin and E. Tóvári and Y. Yang and L. Lin and M. Holwill and J. Birkbeck and D. J. Perello and Shuigang Xu and J. Zultak and R. V. Gorbachev and A. V. Kretinin and T. Taniguchi and K. Watanabe and S. V. Morozov and M. Anđelković and S. P. Milovanović and L. Covaci and F. M. Peeters and A. Mishchenko and A. K. Geim and K. S. Novoselov and Vladimir I. Fal'ko and Angelika Knothe and C. R. Woods},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.12268},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

35 pages, 15 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:57:38.321Z