No Arabic abstract
Excitons are elementary optical excitation in semiconductors. The ability to manipulate and transport these quasiparticles would enable excitonic circuits and devices for quantum photonic technologies. Recently, interlayer excitons in 2D semiconductors have emerged as a promising candidate for engineering excitonic devices due to long lifetime, large exciton binding energy, and gate tunability. However, the charge-neutral nature of the excitons leads to a weak response to the in-plane electric field and thus inhibits transport beyond the diffusion length. Here, we demonstrate the directional transport of interlayer excitons in bilayer WSe2 driven by the dynamic potential lattice induced by surface acoustic waves (SAW). We show that at 100 K, the SAW-driven excitonic transport is activated above a threshold acoustic power and reaches a distance at least ten times longer than the diffusion length, only limited by the device size. Temperature-dependent measurement reveals the transition from the diffusion-limited regime at low temperature to an acoustic field-driven regime at elevated temperature. Our work shows that acoustic waves are an effective, contact-free means to control exciton dynamics and transport, promising for realizing 2D materials-based excitonic devices such as exciton transistors, switches, and transducers.
While it is often assumed that the orbital transport is short-ranged due to strong crystal field potential and orbital quenching, we show that orbital propagation can be remarkably long-ranged in ferromagnets. In contrast to spin transport, which exhibits an oscillatory decaying behavior by spin dephasing, the injected orbital angular momentum does not oscillate and decays slowly. This unusual feature is attributed to nearly degenerate states in $mathbf{k}$-space, which form hot-spots for the intrinsic orbital response. We demonstrate this in a bilayer consisting of a nonmagnet and a ferromagnet, where the orbital Hall current is injected from a nonmagnet into a ferromagnet. Interaction of the orbital Hall current with the magnetization in the ferromagnet results in an intrinsic response of the orbital angular momentum which propagates far beyond the spin dephasing length. This gives rise to a distinct type of orbital torque on the magnetization, increasing with the thickness of the ferromagnet. Such behavior may serve as critical long-sought evidence of orbital transport to be directly tested in experiments. Our findings open the possibility of using long-range orbital transport in orbitronic device applications.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials for their versatile band structures and strictly 2D nature have attracted considerable attention over the past decade. Graphene is a robust material for spintronics owing to its weak spin-orbit and hyperfine interactions, while monolayer 2H-transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) possess a Zeeman effect-like band splitting in which the spin and valley degrees of freedom are nondegenerate. Monolayer 1T-TMDs are 2D topological insulators and are expected to host Majorana zero modes when they are placed in contact with S-wave superconductors. Single electron transport as well as the superconductor proximity effect in these materials are viable for use in both conventional quantum computing and fault-torrent topological quantum computing. In this chapter, we review a selection of theoretical and experimental studies addressing the issues mentioned above. We will focus on: (1) the confinement and manipulation of charges in nanostructures fabricated from graphene and 2H-TMDs (2) 2D materials-based Josephson junctions for possible superconducting qubits (3) the quantum spin Hall states in 1T-TMDs and their topological properties. We aim to outline the current challenges and suggest how future work will be geared towards developing quantum computing devices in 2D materials.
We report electron transport measurements through nano-scale devices consisting of 1 to 3 Prussian blue analog (PBA) nanocrystals connected between two electrodes. We compare two types of cubic nanocrystals, CsCoFe (15 nm) and CsNiCr (6 nm), deposited on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite and contacted by conducting-AFM. The measured currents show an exponential dependence with the length of the PBA nano-device (up to 45 nm), with low decay factors b{eta}, in the range 0.11 - 0.18 nm-1 and 0.25 - 0.34 nm-1 for the CsCoFe and the CsNiCr nanocrystals, respectively. From the theoretical analysis of the current-voltage curve for the nano-scale device made of a single nanoparticle, we deduce that the electron transport is mediated by the localized d bands at around 0.5 eV from the electrode Fermi energy in the two cases. By comparison with previously reported ab-initio calculations, we tentatively identify the involved orbitals as the filled Fe(II)-t2g d band (HOMO) for CsCoFe and the half-filled Ni(II)-eg d band (SOMO) for CsNiCr. Conductance values measured for multi-nanoparticle nano-scale devices (2 and 3 nanocrystals between the electrodes) are consistent with a multi-step coherent tunneling in the off-resonance regime between adjacent PBAs, a simple model gives a strong coupling (around 0.1 - 0.25 eV) between the adjacent PBA nanocrystals, mediated by electrostatic interactions.
In quantizing magnetic fields, graphene superlattices exhibit a complex fractal spectrum often referred to as the Hofstadter butterfly. It can be viewed as a collection of Landau levels that arise from quantization of Brown-Zak minibands recurring at rational ($p/q$) fractions of the magnetic flux quantum per superlattice unit cell. Here we show that, in graphene-on-boron-nitride superlattices, Brown-Zak fermions can exhibit mobilities above 10$^6$ cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$ and the mean free path exceeding several micrometers. The exceptional quality of our devices allows us to show that Brown-Zak minibands are $4q$ times degenerate and all the degeneracies (spin, valley and mini-valley) can be lifted by exchange interactions below 1K. We also found negative bend resistance at $1/q$ fractions for electrical probes placed as far as several micrometers apart. The latter observation highlights the fact that Brown-Zak fermions are Bloch quasiparticles propagating in high fields along straight trajectories, just like electrons in zero field.
Rapid and efficient preparation, manipulation and transfer of quantum states through an array of quantum dots (QDs) is a demanding requisite task for quantum information processing and quantum computation in solid-state physics. Conventional adiabatic protocols, as coherent transfer by adiabatic passage (CTAP) and its variations, provide slow transfer prone to decoherence, which could lower the fidelity to some extent. To achieve the robustness against decoherence, we propose a protocol of speeding up the adiabatic charge transfer in multi-QD systems, sharing the concept of Shortcuts to Adiabaticity (STA). We first apply the STA techniques, including the counterdiabatic driving and inverse engineering, to speed up the direct (long range) transfer between edge dots in triple QDs. Then, we extend our analysis to a multi-dot system. We show how by implementing the modified pulses, fast adiabatic-like charge transport between the outer dots can be eventually achieved without populating intermediate dots. We discuss as well the dependence of the transfer fidelity on the operation time in the presence of dephasing. The proposed protocols for accelerating adiabatic charge transfer directly between the outer dots in a QD array offers a robust mechanism for quantum information processing, by minimizing decoherence and relaxation processes.