English

Tunable Moir\'e Bands and Strong Correlations in Small-Twist-Angle Bilayer Graphene

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2017-06-27 v1 Materials Science Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

According to electronic structure theory, bilayer graphene is expected to have anomalous electronic properties when it has long-period moir\'e patterns produced by small misalignments between its individual layer honeycomb lattices. We have realized bilayer graphene moir\'e crystals with accurately controlled twist angles smaller than 1 degree and studied their properties using scanning probe microscopy and electron transport. We observe conductivity minima at charge neutrality, satellite gaps that appear at anomalous carrier densities for twist angles smaller than 1 degree, and tunneling densities-of-states that are strongly dependent on carrier density. These features are robust up to large transverse electric fields. In perpendicular magnetic fields, we observe the emergence of a Hofstadter butterfly in the energy spectrum, with four-fold degenerate Landau levels, and broken symmetry quantum Hall states at filling factors 1, 2, 3. These observations demonstrate that at small twist angles, the electronic properties of bilayer graphene moir\'e crystals are strongly altered by electron-electron interactions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.00888,
  title  = {Tunable Moir\'e Bands and Strong Correlations in Small-Twist-Angle Bilayer Graphene},
  author = {Kyounghwan Kim and Ashley DaSilva and Shengqiang Huang and Babak Fallahazad and Stefano Larentis and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe and Brian J. LeRoy and Allan H. MacDonald and Emanuel Tutuc},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.00888},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

17 pages, 7 main figures; to appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences