Correlated insulator behaviour at half-filling in magic-angle graphene superlattices

Correlated insulator behaviour at half-filling in magic-angle graphene superlattices Nature 556, 7699 (2018). doi:10.1038/nature26154 Authors: Yuan Cao, Valla Fatemi, Ahmet Demir, Shiang Fang, Spencer L. Tomarken, Jason Y. Luo, Javier D. Sanchez-Yamagishi, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Efthimios Kaxiras, Ray C. Ashoori & Pablo Jarillo-Herrero A van der Waals heterostructure is a type of metamaterial that consists of vertically stacked two-dimensional building blocks held together by the van der Waals forces between the layers. This design means that the properties of van der Waals heterostructures can be engineered precisely, even more so than those of two-dimensional materials. One such property is the ‘twist’ angle between different layers in the heterostructure. This angle has a crucial role in the electronic properties of van der Waals heterostructures, but does not have a direct analogue in other types of heterostructure, such as semiconductors grown using molecular beam epitaxy. For small twist angles, the moiré pattern that is produced by the lattice misorientation between the two-dimensional layers creates long-range modulation of the stacking order. So far, studies of the effects of the twist angle in van der Waals heterostructures have concentrated mostly on heterostructures consisting of monolayer graphene on top of hexagonal boron nitride, which exhibit relatively weak interlayer interaction owing to the large bandgap in he...
Source: Nature - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Letter Source Type: research
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