Currently there is a lively discussion concerning Fermi velocity renormalization in twisted bilayers and several contradicted experimental results are reported.Here we study electronic structures of the twisted bilayers by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS). The interlayer coupling strengths between the adjacent bilayers are measured according to energy separations of two pronounced low-energy van Hove singularities (VHSs) in the STS spectra.We demonstrate that there is a large range of values for the interlayer interaction in different twisted bilayers. Below the VHSs, the observed Landau quantization in the twisted bilayers is identical to that of massless Dirac fermions in graphene monolayer, which allows us to measure the Fermi velocity directly.
Our result indicates that the Fermi velocity of the twisted bilayers depends remarkably on both the twisted angles and the interlayer coupling strengths.This removes the discrepancy about the Fermi velocity renormalization in the twisted bilayers and provides a consistent interpretation of all current data.
Twist, as a simple and unique degree of freedom, could lead to enormous novel quantum phenomena in bilayer graphene. A small rotation angle introduces lowenergy van Hove singularities (VHSs) approaching the Fermi level, which result in unusual correlated states in the bilayer graphene. It is reasonable to expect that the twist could also affect the electronic properties of few-layer graphene dramatically. However, such an issue has remained experimentally elusive. Here, by using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), we systematically studied a twisted trilayer graphene (TTG) with two different small twist angles between adjacent layers. Two sets of VHSs originating from the two twist angles were observed in the TTG, indicating that the TTG could be simply regarded as a combination of two different twisted bilayer graphene. By using high-resolution STS, we observed split of the VHSs and directly imaged spatial symmetry breaking of electronic states around the VHSs. These results suggest that electron-electron interactions play an important role in affecting the electronic properties of graphene systems with low-energy VHSs.
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