Superlattice-Induced Insulating States and Valley-Protected Orbits in Twisted Bilayer Graphene

Twisted bilayer graphene (TBLG) is one of the simplest van der Waals heterostructures, yet it yields a complex electronic system with intricate interplay between moiré physics and interlayer hybridization effects. We report on electronic transport measurements of high mobility small angle TBLG devic...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fang, S., Sanchez-Yamagishi, J. D., Watanabe, K., Taniguchi, T., Kaxiras, E., Cao, Y., Fatemi, Valla, Luo, J. Y., Jarillo-Herrero, Pablo
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105180
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3648-7706
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8217-8213
Description
Summary:Twisted bilayer graphene (TBLG) is one of the simplest van der Waals heterostructures, yet it yields a complex electronic system with intricate interplay between moiré physics and interlayer hybridization effects. We report on electronic transport measurements of high mobility small angle TBLG devices showing clear evidence for insulating states at the superlattice band edges, with thermal activation gaps several times larger than theoretically predicted. Moreover, Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations and tight binding calculations reveal that the band structure consists of two intersecting Fermi contours whose crossing points are effectively unhybridized. We attribute this to exponentially suppressed interlayer hopping amplitudes for momentum transfers larger than the moiré wave vector.