Publications

Highlights

Tunable Excitons in Bilayer Graphene

Bilayer graphene has a unique bandstructure where a electrically tunable bandgap exists at corners of the first Brillouin Zone. By opening the gap with external gates, excitons--as the fundamental optical excitation of semiconductors--are expected to host pseudospin-related properties that are distinct from other semiconductors.

For the first time, we observed such excitons in bilayer graphene that have unusual selections rules, significant oscillator strength, extremely narrow linewidth and they can be tuned from mid-infrared to Terahertz range. More interestingly, these excitons exhibit a large valley g-factor of 20 in magnetic fields as determined by the outstanding Berry curvature effects. 

See also L. Ju et al., Tunable Excitons in Bilayer Graphene, Science 358.6365 (2017): 907-910. 

Topological Valley Transport at Graphene Domain Walls

Electron valley, a degree of freedom that is analogous to spin, can lead to novel topological phases in bilayer graphene. Gapped bilayer graphene is predicted to be a topological insulating phase protected by no-valley mixing symmetry, featuring quantum valley Hall effects and chiral edge states. Theoretical work has shown that domain walls between AB- and BA-stacked bilayer graphene can support protected chiral edge states of quantum valley Hall insulators. 

We employ near-field infrared nanoscopy to image in situ bilayer graphene layer-stacking domain walls on device substrates, and we fabricate dual-gated field effect transistors based on the domain walls. These devices feature one-dimensional valley-polarized conducting channels with a ballistic length of about 400 nanometres at 4 kelvin. 

See also, L. Ju et al., Topological Valley Transport at Bilayer Graphene Domain Walls, Nature 520, 650(2015)

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