Novel electronic states seen in graphene

Mele, Eugene J.

doi:10.1038/d41586-018-02660-4

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05 March 2018

Novel electronic states seen in graphene

A simple system made from two sheets of graphene has been converted from an insulator to a superconductor. The finding holds promise for opening up studies of an unconventional form of superconductivity.

Eugene J. Mele⁰

Eugene J. Mele
1. Eugene J. Mele is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
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In two papers in Nature, Cao et al.¹^,² report the discovery of new electronic ground states in twisted bilayer graphene — a pair of single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms, stacked with their honeycomb lattices rotated out of alignment. The authors interpret one of these states² as a correlated Mott insulator, a non-conducting state produced by strong repulsive interactions between electrons. The other¹ is a superconductor, a state of zero electrical resistance produced by effective attractive interactions between electrons. The insulator turns into the superconductor when a small number of charge carriers are added to the graphene. This connection between the states is unlikely to be a coincidence — as Sherlock Holmes might have commented, “the universe is rarely so lazy”.

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Nature 556, 37-38 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02660-4

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