No Arabic abstract
2D materials based superlattices have emerged as a promising platform to modulate band structure and its symmetries. In particular, moire periodicity in twisted graphene systems produces flat Chern bands. The recent observation of anomalous Hall effect (AHE) and orbital magnetism in twisted bilayer graphene has been associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking of such Chern bands. However, the valley Hall state as a precursor of AHE state, when time-reversal symmetry is still protected, has not been observed. Our work probes this precursor state using the valley Hall effect. We show that broken inversion symmetry in twisted double bilayer graphene (TDBG) facilitates the generation of bulk valley current by reporting the first experimental evidence of nonlocal transport in a nearly flat band system. Despite the spread of Berry curvature hotspots and reduced quasiparticle velocities of the carriers in these flat bands, we observe large nonlocal voltage several micrometers away from the charge current path -- this persists when the Fermi energy lies inside a gap with large Berry curvature. The high sensitivity of the nonlocal voltage to gate tunable carrier density and gap modulating perpendicular electric field makes TDBG an attractive platform for valley-twistronics based on flat bands.
Twisted graphene bilayers provide a versatile platform to engineer metamaterials with novel emergent properties by exploiting the resulting geometric moir{e} superlattice. Such superlattices are known to host bulk valley currents at tiny angles ($alphaapprox 0.3 ^circ$) and flat bands at magic angles ($alpha approx 1^circ$). We show that tuning the twist angle to $alpha^*approx 0.8^circ$ generates flat bands away from charge neutrality with a triangular superlattice periodicity. When doped with $pm 6$ electrons per moire cell, these bands are half-filled and electronic interactions produce a symmetry-broken ground state (Stoner instability) with spin-polarized regions that order ferromagnetically. Application of an interlayer electric field breaks inversion symmetry and introduces valley-dependent dispersion that quenches the magnetic order. With these results, we propose a solid-state platform that realizes electrically tunable strong correlations.
Starting with twisted bilayer graphene, graphene-based moire materials have recently been established as a new platform for studying strong electron correlations. In this paper, we study twisted graphene monolayers on trilayer graphene and demonstrate that this system can host flat bands when the twist angle is close to the magic-angle of 1.16$^circ$. When monolayer graphene is twisted on ABA trilayer graphene, the flat bands are not isolated, but are intersected by a Dirac cone with a large Fermi velocity. In contrast, graphene twisted on ABC trilayer graphene (denoted AtABC) exhibits a gap between flat and remote bands. Since ABC trilayer graphene and twisted bilayer graphene are known to host broken-symmetry phases, we further investigate the ostensibly similar magic angle AtABC system. We study the effect of electron-electron interactions in AtABC using both Hartree theory and an atomic Hubbard theory to calculate the magnetic phase diagram as a function of doping, twist angle, and perpendicular electric field. Our analysis reveals a rich variety of magnetic orderings, including ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism, and demonstrates that a perpendicular electric field makes AtABC more susceptible to magnetic ordering.
Topological insulators realized in materials with strong spin-orbit interactions challenged the long-held view that electronic materials are classified as either conductors or insulators. The emergence of controlled, two-dimensional moire patterns has opened new vistas in the topological materials landscape. Here we report on evidence, obtained by combining thermodynamic measurements, local and non-local transport measurements, and theoretical calculations, that robust topologically non-trivial, valley Chern insulators occur at charge neutrality in twisted double-bilayer graphene (TDBG). These time reversal-conserving valley Chern insulators are enabled by valley-number conservation, a symmetry that emerges from the moire pattern. The thermodynamic gap extracted from chemical potential measurements proves that TDBG is a bulk insulator under transverse electric field, while transport measurements confirm the existence of conducting edge states. A Landauer-Buttiker analysis of measurements on multi-terminal samples allows us to quantitatively assess edge state scattering and demonstrate that it does not destroy the edge states, leaving the bulk-boundary correspondence largely intact.
We predict that in a twisted homobilayer of transition-metal dichalcogenide MoS$_2$, spin-orbit coupling in the conduction band states from $pm K$ valleys can give rise to moir{e} flat bands with nonzero Chern numbers in each valley. The nontrivial band topology originates from a unique combination of angular twist and local mirror symmetry breaking in each individual layer, which results in unusual skyrmionic spin textures in momentum space with skyrmion number $mathcal{S} = pm 2$. Our Hartree-Fock analysis further suggests that density-density interactions generically drive the system at $1/2$-filling into a valley-polarized state, which realizes a correlated quantum anomalous Hall state with Chern number $mathcal{C} = pm 2$. Effects of displacement fields are discussed with comparison to nontrivial topology from layer-pseudospin magnetic fields.
Complex oxide interfaces are a promising platform for studying a wide array of correlated electron phenomena in low-dimensions, including magnetism and superconductivity. The microscopic origin of these phenomena in complex oxide interfaces remains an open question. Here we investigate for the first time the magnetic properties of semi-insulating NdTiO$_3$/SrTiO$_3$ (NTO/STO) interfaces and present the first milli-Kelvin study of NTO/STO. The magnetoresistance (MR) reveals signatures of local ferromagnetic order and of spin-dependent thermally-activated transport, which are described quantitatively by a simple phenomenological model. We discuss possible origins of the interfacial ferromagnetism. In addition, the MR also shows transient hysteretic features on a timescale of ~10-100 seconds. We demonstrate that these are consistent with an extrinsic magneto-thermal origin, which may have been misinterpreted in previous reports of magnetism in STO-based oxide interfaces. The existence of these two MR regimes (steady-state and transient) highlights the importance of time-dependent measurements for distinguishing signatures of ferromagnetism from other effects that can produce hysteresis at low temperatures.