No Arabic abstract
The unusual electronic properties of graphene, which are a direct consequence of its two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb lattice, have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Creation of artificial lattices that recreate graphenes honeycomb topology, known as artificial graphene, can facilitate the investigation of graphene-like phenomena, such as the existence of massless Dirac fermions, in a tunable system. In this work, we present the fabrication of artificial graphene in an ultra-high quality GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well, with lattice period as small as 50 nm, the smallest reported so far for this type of system. Electron-beam lithography is used to define an etch mask with honeycomb geometry on the surface of the sample, and different methodologies are compared and discussed. An optimized anisotropic reactive ion etching process is developed to transfer the pattern into the AlGaAs layer and create the artificial graphene. The achievement of such high-resolution artificial graphene should allow the observation for the first time of massless Dirac fermions in an engineered semiconductor.
We have fabricated AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure devices in which the conduction channel can be populated with either electrons or holes simply by changing the polarity of a gate bias. The heterostructures are entirely undoped, and carriers are instead induced electrostatically. We use these devices to perform a direct comparison of the scattering mechanisms of two-dimensional (2D) electrons ($mu_textrm{peak}=4times10^6textrm{cm}^2/textrm{Vs}$) and holes ($mu_textrm{peak}=0.8times10^6textrm{cm}^2/textrm{Vs}$) in the same conduction channel with nominally identical disorder potentials. We find significant discrepancies between electron and hole scattering, with the hole mobility being considerably lower than expected from simple theory.
We present a simple technique to fabricate graphene quantum dots in a cryostat. It relies upon the controlled rupture of a suspended graphene sheet subjected to the application of a large electron current. This results in the in-situ formation of a clean and ultra-narrow constriction, which hosts one quantum dot, and occasionally a few quantum dots in series. Conductance spectroscopy indicates that individual quantum dots can possess an addition energy as large as 180 meV and a level spacing as large as 25 meV. Our technique has several assets: (i) the dot is suspended, thus the electrostatic influence of the substrate is reduced, and (ii) contamination is minimized, since the edges of the dot have only been exposed to the vacuum in the cryostat.
Heavy fermion systems represent one of the paradigmatic strongly correlated states of matter. They have been used as a platform for investigating exotic behavior ranging from quantum criticality and non-Fermi liquid behavior to unconventional topological superconductivity. Heavy fermions arise from the exchange interaction between localized magnetic moments and conduction electrons that leads to the well-known Kondo effect. In a Kondo lattice, the interaction between the localized moments gives rise to a band with heavy effective mass. This intriguing phenomenology has so far only been realized in compounds containing rare-earth elements with 4f or 5f electrons. Here, we realize a designer van der Waals heterostructure where artificial heavy fermions emerge from the Kondo coupling between a lattice of localized magnetic moments and itinerant electrons in a 1T/1H-TaS$_2$ heterostructure. We study the heterostructure using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) and show that depending on the stacking order of the monolayers, we can either reveal the localized magnetic moments and the associated Kondo effect, or the conduction electrons with a heavy-fermion hybridization gap. Our experiments realize an ultimately tuneable platform for future experiments probing enhanced many-body correlations, dimensional tuning of quantum criticality, and unconventional superconductivity in two-dimensional artificial heavy-fermion systems.
We have studied theoretically the type-II GaAsSb capped InAs quantum dots for two structures differing in the composition of the capping layer, being either (i) constant or (ii) with Sb accumulation above the apex of the dot. We have found that the hole states are segmented and resemble the states in the quantum dot molecules. The two-hole states form singlet and triplet with the splitting energy of 4{mu}eV / 325{mu}eV for the case (i) / (ii). We have also tested the possibility to tune the splitting by vertically applied magnetic field. As the predicted tunability range was limited, we propose an approach for its enhancement.
Two-dimensional systems that host one-dimensional helical states are exciting from the perspective of scalable topological quantum computation when coupled with a superconductor. Graphene is particularly promising for its high electronic quality, versatility in van der Waals heterostructures and its electron and hole-like degenerate 0$th$ Landau level. Here, we study a compact double layer graphene SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device), where the superconducting loop is reduced to the superconducting contacts, connecting two parallel graphene Josephson junctions. Despite the small size of the SQUID, it is fully tunable by independent gate control of the Fermi energies in both layers. Furthermore, both Josephson junctions show a skewed current phase relationship, indicating the presence of superconducting modes with high transparency. In the quantum Hall regime we measure a well defined conductance plateau of 2$e^2/h$ an indicative of counter propagating edge channels in the two layers. Our work opens a way for engineering topological superconductivity by coupling helical edge states, from graphenes electron-hole degenerate 0$th$ Landau level via superconducting contacts.