English

Correlated insulating states in slow Dirac fermions on a honeycomb moir{\'e} superlattice

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2025-04-28 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Strong Coulomb repulsion is predicted to open a many-body charge gap at the Dirac point of graphene, transforming the semimetal into a Mott insulator. However, this correlated insulating phase has remained inaccessible in pristine graphene, where a large Fermi velocity dominates the interaction effects. To overcome this limitation, we realize a honeycomb moir{\'e} superlattice in a twisted MoSe2_2 homobilayer, where a graphene-like band structure forms with a Fermi velocity reduced by nearly two orders of magnitude. These slow moir{\'e} bands are folded from the valence band maximum at the Γ\Gamma valley of the extended Brillouin zone with negligible spin-orbital coupling, and can therefore simulate massless Dirac fermions in the strongly correlated regime with full SU(2) symmetry. By correlating Rydberg exciton sensing with moir{\'e} trions of different spatial characters, we detect a Mott gap at the Dirac point that persists up to 110 K. We further identify correlated insulating states at ν=1\nu=-1 with a weak ferromagnetic coupling as well as at several fractional fillings. Our results highlight the potential of studying a wide range of quantum many-body phenomena in twisted two-dimensional materials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.17970,
  title  = {Correlated insulating states in slow Dirac fermions on a honeycomb moir{\'e} superlattice},
  author = {Dongyang Yang and Jing Liang and Haodong Hu and Nitin Kaushal and Chih-En Hsu and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Jerry. I Dadap and Zhenglu Li and Marcel Franz and Ziliang Ye},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17970},
  year   = {2025}
}