Materials with flat electronic bands often exhibit exotic quantum phenomena owing to strong correlations. Remarkably, an isolated low-energy flat band can be induced in bilayer graphene by simply rotating the layers to 1.1 • , resulting in the appearance of gate-tunable superconducting and correlated insulating phases. Here, we demonstrate that in addition to the twist angle, the interlayer coupling can also be modified to precisely tune these phases. We establish the capability to induce superconductivity at a twist angle larger than 1.1 • -in which correlated phases are otherwise absent -by varying the interlayer spacing with hydrostatic pressure. Realizing devices with low disorder additionally reveals new details about the superconducting phase diagram and its relationship to the nearby insulator. Our results demonstrate twisted bilayer graphene to be a uniquely tunable platform for exploring novel correlated states. arXiv:1808.07865v2 [cond-mat.mes-hall]
van der Waals heterostructures constitute a new class of artificial materials formed by stacking atomically thin planar crystals. We demonstrated band structure engineering in a van der Waals heterostructure composed of a monolayer graphene flake coupled to a rotationally aligned hexagonal boron nitride substrate. The spatially varying interlayer atomic registry results in both a local breaking of the carbon sublattice symmetry and a long-range moiré superlattice potential in the graphene. In our samples, this interplay between short- and long-wavelength effects resulted in a band structure described by isolated superlattice minibands and an unexpectedly large band gap at charge neutrality. This picture is confirmed by our observation of fractional quantum Hall states at ± 5/3 filling and features associated with the Hofstadter butterfly at ultrahigh magnetic fields.
The Schrödinger equation dictates that the propagation of nearly free electrons through a weak periodic potential results in the opening of bandgaps near points of the reciprocal lattice known as Brillouin zone boundaries 1 . However, in the case of massless Dirac fermions, it has been predicted that the chirality of the charge carriers prevents the opening of a bandgap and instead new Dirac points appear in the electronic structure of the material 2,3 . Graphene on hexagonal boron nitride exhibits a rotation-dependent moiré pattern 4,5 . Here, we show experimentally and theoretically that this moiré pattern acts as a weak periodic potential and thereby leads to the emergence of a new set of Dirac points at an energy determined by its wavelength. The new massless Dirac fermions generated at these superlattice Dirac points are characterized by a significantly reduced Fermi velocity. Furthermore, the local density of states near these Dirac cones exhibits hexagonal modulation due to the influence of the periodic potential.Owing to its hexagonal lattice structure with a diatomic unit cell, graphene has low-energy electronic properties that are governed by the massless Dirac equation 6 . This has a number of consequences, among them Klein tunnelling [7][8][9][10] , which prevents electrostatic confinement of charge carriers and inhibits the fabrication of standard semiconductor devices. This has motivated a number of recent theoretical investigations of graphene in periodic potentials 2,3,[11][12][13][14][15] , which explored ways of controlling the propagation of charge carriers by means of various superlattice potentials. On the analytical side, one-dimensional potentials render particle propagation anisotropic 2,3,11,14 and generate new Dirac points, where the electron and hole bands meet, at energies ±hv F |G|/2 given by the reciprocal superlattice vectors G (refs 2,3), where v F is the Fermi velocity. Numerical approaches have extended several of these results to the case of two-dimensional potentials 2,3,14,15 . Unlike for Schrödinger fermions, the periodic potentials generally induce new Dirac points but do not open bandgaps in graphene, owing to the chiral nature of the Dirac fermions.Recent scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) topography experiments have reported well-developed moiré patterns in graphene on crystalline substrates, which suggests that the latter generate effective periodic potentials 4,5,16,17 . Of particular interest is hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), because it is an insulator which only couples weakly to graphene. Furthermore, graphene on hBN exhibits the highest mobility ever reported for graphene on any substrate 18 , and has strongly suppressed charge inhomogeneities 4,5 . Hexagonal boron nitride is a layered material whose planes have the same atomic structure as graphene, with a 1.8% longer lattice constant. The influence of the weak graphene-substrate interlayer coupling on the electronic transport and spectroscopic properties of graphene is not well understood. In particular, there ...
We describe the realization of van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures with accurate rotational alignment of individual layer crystal axes. We illustrate the approach by demonstrating a Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene formed using successive transfers of monolayer graphene flakes. The Raman spectra of this artificial bilayer graphene possess a wide 2D band, which is best fit by four Lorentzians, consistent with Bernal stacking. Scanning tunneling microscopy reveals no moiré pattern on the artificial bilayer graphene, and tunneling spectroscopy as a function of gate voltage reveals a constant density of states, also in agreement with Bernal stacking. In addition, electron transport probed in dual-gated samples reveals a band gap opening as a function of transverse electric field. To illustrate the applicability of this technique to realize vdW heterostructuctures in which the functionality is critically dependent on rotational alignment, we demonstrate resonant tunneling double bilayer graphene heterostructures separated by hexagonal boron-nitride dielectric.
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