No Arabic abstract
Measurement and theory of the two-terminal conductance of monolayer and bilayer graphene in the quantum Hall regime are compared. We examine features of conductance as a function of gate voltage that allow monolayer, bilayer, and gapped samples to be distinguished, including N-shaped distortions of quantum Hall plateaus and conductance peaks and dips at the charge neutrality point. Generally good agreement is found between measurement and theory. Possible origins of discrepancies are discussed.
We report the observation of the quantized Hall effect in suspended graphene probed with a two-terminal lead geometry. The failure of earlier Hall-bar measurements is discussed and attributed to the placement of voltage probes in mesoscopic samples. New quantized states are found at integer Landau level fillings outside the sequence 2,6,10.., as well as at a fractional filling u=1/3. Their presence is revealed by plateaus in the two-terminal conductance which appear in magnetic fields as low as 2 Tesla at low temperatures and persist up to 20 Kelvin in 12 Tesla. The excitation gaps, extracted from the data with the help of a theoretical model, are found to be significantly larger than in GaAs based electron systems.
Central to spintronics is the interconversion between electronic charge and spin currents, and this can arise from the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. CISS is often studied as magnetoresistance (MR) in two-terminal (2T) electronic devices containing a chiral (molecular) component and a ferromagnet. However, fundamental understanding of when and how this MR can occur is lacking. Here, we uncover an elementary mechanism that generates such a MR for nonlinear response. It requires energy-dependent transport and energy relaxation within the device. The sign of the MR depends on chirality, charge carrier type, and bias direction. Additionally, we reveal how CISS can be detected in the linear response regime in magnet-free 2T devices, either by forming a chirality-based spin-valve using two or more chiral components, or by Hanle spin precession in devices with a single chiral component. Our results provide operation principles and design guidelines for chirality-based spintronic devices and technologies.
Series connection of four quantum Hall effect (QHE) devices based on epitaxial graphene films was studied for realization of a quantum resistance standard with an up-scaled value. The tested devices showed quantum Hall plateaux RH,2 at filling factor i = 2 starting from relatively low magnetic field (between 4 T and 5 T) when temperature was 1.5 K. Precision measurements of quantized Hall resistance of four QHE devices connected by triple series connections and external bonding wires were done at B = 7 T and T = 1.5 K using a commercial precision resistance bridge with 50 microA current through the QHE device. The results showed that the deviation of the quantized Hall resistance of the series connection of four graphene-based QHE devices from the expected value of 4*RH,2 = 2h/e^2 was smaller than the relative standard uncertainty of the measurement (< 1*10^-7) limited by the used resistance bridge.
Bilayer graphene in a perpendicular electric field can host domain walls between regions of reversed field direction or interlayer stacking. The gapless modes propagating along these domain walls, while not strictly topological, nevertheless have interesting physical properties, including valley-momentum locking. A junction where two domain walls intersect forms the analogue of a quantum point contact. We study theoretically the critical behavior of this junction near the pinch-off transition, which is controlled by two separate classes of non-trivial quantum critical points. For strong interactions, the junction can host phases of unique charge and valley conductances. For weaker interactions, the low-temperature charge conductance can undergo one of two possible quantum phase transitions, each characterized by a specific critical exponent and a collapse to a universal scaling function, which we compute.
Periodic driving fields can induce topological phase transitions, resulting in Floquet topological phases with intriguing properties such as very large Chern numbers and unusual edge states. Whether such Floquet topological phases could generate robust edge state conductance much larger than their static counterparts is an interesting question. In this paper, working under the Keldysh formalism, we study two-lead transport via the edge states of irradiated quantum Hall insulators using the method of recursive Floquet-Greens functions. Focusing on a harmonically-driven Hofstadter model, we show that quantized Hall conductance as large as $8e^2/h$ can be realized, but only after applying the so-called Floquet sum rule. To assess the robustness of edge state transport, we analyze the DC conductance, time-averaged current profile and local density of states. It is found that co-propagating chiral edge modes are more robust against disorder and defects as compared with the remarkable counter-propagating edge modes, as well as certain symmetry-restricted Floquet edge modes. Furthermore, we go beyond the wide-band limit, which is often assumed for the leads, to study how the conductance quantization (after applying the Floquet sum rule) of Floquet edge states can be affected if the leads have finite bandwidths. These results may be useful for the design of transport devices based on Floquet topological matter.