We present a fabrication process for high quality suspended and double gated trilayer graphene devices. The electrical transport measurements in these transistors reveal a high charge carrier mobility (higher than 20000 cm^2/Vs) and ballistic electric transport on a scale larger than 200nm. We report a particularly large on/off ratio of the current in ABC-stacked trilayers, up to 250 for an average electric displacement of -0.08 V/nm, compatible with an electric field induced energy gap. The high quality of these devices is also demonstrated by the appearance of quantum Hall plateaus at magnetic fields as low as 500mT.
We report pronounced magnetoconductance oscillations observed on suspended bilayer and trilayer graphene devices with mobilities up to 270,000 cm2/Vs. For bilayer devices, we observe conductance minima at all integer filling factors nu between 0 and -8, as well as a small plateau at { u}=1/3. For trilayer devices, we observe features at nu=-1, -2, -3 and -4, and at { u}~0.5 that persist to 4.5K at B=8T. All of these features persist for all accessible values of Vg and B, and could suggest the onset of symmetry breaking of the first few Landau (LL) levels and fractional quantum Hall states.
Few layer graphene systems such as Bernal stacked bilayer and rhombohedral (ABC-) stacked trilayer offer the unique possibility to open an electric field tunable energy gap. To date, this energy gap has been experimentally confirmed in optical spectroscopy. Here we report the first direct observation of the electric field tunable energy gap in electronic transport experiments on doubly gated suspended ABC-trilayer graphene. From a systematic study of the non-linearities in current textit{versus} voltage characteristics and the temperature dependence of the conductivity we demonstrate that thermally activated transport over the energy-gap dominates the electrical response of these transistors. The estimated values for energy gap from the temperature dependence and from the current voltage characteristics follow the theoretically expected electric field dependence with critical exponent $3/2$. These experiments indicate that high quality few-layer graphene are suitable candidates for exploring novel tunable THz light sources and detectors.
We discuss transport through double gated single and few layer graphene devices. This kind of device configuration has been used to investigate the modulation of the energy band structure through the application of an external perpendicular electric field, a unique property of few layer graphene systems. Here we discuss technological details that are important for the fabrication of top gated structures, based on electron-gun evaporation of SiO$_2$. We perform a statistical study that demonstrates how --contrary to expectations-- the breakdown field of electron-gun evaporated thin SiO$_2$ films is comparable to that of thermally grown oxide layers. We find that a high breakdown field can be achieved in evaporated SiO$_2$ only if the oxide deposition is directly followed by the metallization of the top electrodes, without exposure to air of the SiO$_2$ layer.
Twisted graphene multilayers have demonstrated to yield a versatile playground to engineer controllable electronic states. Here, by combining first-principles calculations and low-energy models, we demonstrate that twisted graphene trilayers provide a tunable system where van Hove singularities can be controlled electrically. In particular, it is shown that besides the band flattening, bulk valley currents appear, which can be quenched by local chemical dopants. We finally show that in the presence of electronic interactions, a non-uniform superfluid density emerges, whose non-uniformity gives rise to spectroscopic signatures in dispersive higher energy bands. Our results put forward twisted trilayers as a tunable van der Waals heterostructure displaying electrically controllable flat bands and bulk valley currents.
Magneto-transport experiments on ABC-stacked suspended trilayer graphene reveal a complete splitting of the twelve-fold degenerated lowest Landau level, and, in particular, the opening of an exchange-driven gap at the charge neutrality point. A quantitative analysis of distinctness of the quantum Hall plateaus as a function of field yields a hierarchy of the filling factors: u=6, 4, and 0 are the most pronounced, followed by u=3, and finally u=1, 2 and 5. Apart from the appearance of a u=4 state, which is probably caused by a layer asymmetry, this sequence is in agreement with Hunds rules for ABC-stacked trilayer graphene.