Defects play a key role in determining the properties of most materials and, because they tend to be highly localized, characterizing them at the single-defect level is particularly important. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has a history of imag
ing the electronic structure of individual point defects in conductors, semiconductors, and ultrathin films, but single-defect electronic characterization at the nanometer-scale remains an elusive goal for intrinsic bulk insulators. Here we report the characterization and manipulation of individual native defects in an intrinsic bulk hexagonal boron nitride (BN) insulator via STM. Normally, this would be impossible due to the lack of a conducting drain path for electrical current. We overcome this problem by employing a graphene/BN heterostructure, which exploits graphenes atomically thin nature to allow visualization of defect phenomena in the underlying bulk BN. We observe three different defect structures that we attribute to defects within the bulk insulating boron nitride. Using scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS), we obtain charge and energy-level information for these BN defect structures. In addition to characterizing such defects, we find that it is also possible to manipulate them through voltage pulses applied to our STM tip.
We develop two types of graphene devices based on nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), that allows transport measurement in the presence of in situ strain modulation. Different mobility and conductance responses to strain were observed for single la
yer and bilayer samples. These types of devices can be extended to other 2D membranes such as MoS2, providing transport, optical or other measurements with in situ strain.
We present low temperature transport measurements on dual-gated suspended trilayer graphene in the quantum Hall (QH) regime. We observe QH plateaus at filling factors { u}=-8, -2, 2, 6, and 10, in agreement with the full-parameter tight binding calcu
lations. In high magnetic fields, odd-integer plateaus are also resolved, indicating almost complete lifting of the 12-fold degeneracy of the lowest Landau levels (LL). Under an out-of-plane electric field E, we observe degeneracy breaking and transitions between QH plateaus. Interestingly, depending on its direction, E selectively breaks the LL degeneracies in the electron-doped or hole-doped regimes. Our results underscore the rich interaction-induced phenomena in trilayer graphene.
Bilayer graphene (BLG) at the charge neutrality point (CNP) is strongly susceptible to electronic interactions, and expected to undergo a phase transition into a state with spontaneous broken symmetries. By systematically investigating a large number
of singly- and doubly-gated bilayer graphene (BLG) devices, we show that an insulating state appears only in devices with high mobility and low extrinsic doping. This insulating state has an associated transition temperature Tc~5K and an energy gap of ~3 meV, thus strongly suggesting a gapped broken symmetry state that is destroyed by very weak disorder. The transition to the intrinsic broken symmetry state can be tuned by disorder, out-of-plane electric field, or carrier density.
Coupling high quality, suspended atomic membranes to specialized electrodes enables investigation of many novel phenomena, such as spin or Cooper pair transport in these two dimensional systems. However, many electrode materials are not stable in aci
ds that are used to dissolve underlying substrates. Here we present a versatile and powerful multi-level lithographical technique to suspend atomic membranes, which can be applied to the vast majority of substrate, membrane and electrode materials. Using this technique, we fabricated suspended graphene devices with Al electrodes and mobility of 5500 cm^2/Vs. We also demonstrate, for the first time, fabrication and measurement of a free-standing thin Bi2Se3 membrane, which has low contact resistance to electrodes and a mobility of >~500 cm^2/Vs.
We perform transport measurements in high quality bilayer graphene pnp junctions with suspended top gates. At a magnetic field B=0, we demonstrate band gap opening by an applied perpendicular electric field, with an On/Off ratio up to 20,000 at 260mK
. Within the band gap, the conductance decreases exponentially by 3 orders of magnitude with increasing electric field, and can be accounted for by variable range hopping with a gate-tunable density of states, effective mass, and localization length. At large B, we observe quantum Hall conductance with fractional values, which arise from equilibration of edge states between differentially-doped regions, and the presence of an insulating state at filling factor { u}=0. Our work underscores the importance of bilayer graphene for both fundamental interest and technological applications.
Using high quality graphene pnp junctions, we observe prominent conductance fluctuations on transitions between quantum Hall (QH) plateaus as the top gate voltage Vtg is varied. In the Vtg-B plane, the fluctuations form crisscrossing lines that are p
arallel to those of the adjacent plateaus, with different temperature dependences for the conductance peaks and valleys. These fluctuations arise from Coulomb-induced charging of electron- or hole-doped localized states when the device bulk is delocalized, underscoring the importance of electronic interactions in graphene in the QH regime.
