No Arabic abstract
In this article, we report the electronic band structures of hexagonal bilayer systems, specifically, rotated graphene-graphene and boron nitride-boron nitride bilayers, by introducing an angle between the layers and forming new periodic structures, known as moire patterns. Using a semi-empirical tight-binding approach with a parametrized hopping parameter between the layers, using one orbital per-site approximation, and taking into account nearest-neighbor interactions only, we found he electronic dispersion relations to be around K points in a low energy approximation. Our results show that graphene bilayers exhibit zero band gap for all angles tested in this work. In boron nitride bilayers, the results reveal a tunable bandgap that satisfies the prediction of the bandgap found in one-dimensional diatomic systems presented in the literature.
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes are faster than viscoelastic relaxation, wrinkles that are formed due to remodelling are unable to relax to a configuration that minimises the elastic energy and the sheet is inherently out of equilibrium. We argue that this non-equilibrium regime is of particular interest in biology as it allows the system to access morphologies that are unavailable if restricted to the adiabatic evolution between configurations that minimise the elastic energy alone. Here, we introduce activity using the formalism of evolving target metric and showcase the diversity of wrinkling morphologies arising from out of equilibrium dynamics.
We study, within the tight-binding approximation, the electronic properties of a graphene bilayer in the presence of an external electric field applied perpendicular to the system -- emph{biased bilayer}. The effect of the perpendicular electric field is included through a parallel plate capacitor model, with screening correction at the Hartree level. The full tight-binding description is compared with its 4-band and 2-band continuum approximations, and the 4-band model is shown to be always a suitable approximation for the conditions realized in experiments. The model is applied to real biased bilayer devices, either made out of SiC or exfoliated graphene, and good agreement with experimental results is found, indicating that the model is capturing the key ingredients, and that a finite gap is effectively being controlled externally. Analysis of experimental results regarding the electrical noise and cyclotron resonance further suggests that the model can be seen as a good starting point to understand the electronic properties of graphene bilayer. Also, we study the effect of electron-hole asymmetry terms, as the second-nearest-neighbor hopping energies $t$ (in-plane) and $gamma_{4}$ (inter-layer), and the on-site energy $Delta$.
Twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) forms a quasicrystal whose structural and electronic properties depend on the angle of rotation between its layers. Here we present a scanning tunneling microscopy study of gate-tunable tBLG devices supported by atomically-smooth and chemically inert hexagonal boron nitride (BN). The high quality of these tBLG devices allows identification of coexisting moire patterns and moire super-superlattices produced by graphene-graphene and graphene-BN interlayer interactions. Furthermore, we examine additional tBLG spectroscopic features in the local density of states beyond the first van Hove singularity. Our experimental data is explained by a theory of moire bands that incorporates ab initio calculations and confirms the strongly non-perturbative character of tBLG interlayer coupling in the small twist-angle regime.
The generalized tight-binding model is developed to investigate the magneto-electronic properties in twisted bilayer graphene system. All the interlayer and intralayer atomic interactions are included in the Moire superlattice. The twisted bilayer graphene system is a zero-gap semiconductor with double-degenerate Dirac-cone structures, and saddle-point energy dispersions appearing at low energies for cases of small twisting angles. There exist rich and unique magnetic quantization phenomena, in which many Landau-level subgroups are induced due to specific Moire zone folding through modulating the various stacking angles. The Landau-level spectrum shows hybridized characteristics associated with the those in monolayer, and AA $&$ AB stackings. The complex relations among the different sublattices on the same and different graphene layers are explored in detail.
We study structural and electronic properties of graphene grown on SiC substrate using scanning tunneling microscope (STM), spot-profile-analysis low energy electron diffraction (SPA-LEED) and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). We find several new replicas of Dirac cones in the Brillouin zone (BZ). Their locations can be understood in terms of combination of basis vectors linked to SiC 6x6 and graphene 6xsqrt(3) x 6sqrt(3) reconstruction. Therefore these new features originate from the Moie caused by the lattice mismatch between SiC and graphene. More specifically, Dirac cones replicas are caused by underlying weak modulation of the ionic potential by the substrate that is then experienced by the electrons in the graphene. We also demonstrate that this effect is equally strong in single and tri-layer graphene, therefore the additional Dirac cones are intrinsic features rather than result of photoelectron diffraction. These new features in the electronic structure are very important for the interpretation of recent transport measurements and can assist in tuning the properties of graphene for practical applications.