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Graphene

Tri and tri again

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 925–926 (2011)Cite this article

Monolayer graphene is a semimetal with no bandgap, and bilayer graphene is a semiconductor with a tunable gap. A trio of studies now shows that trilayer graphene can be either, depending on how its layers are stacked — behaviour that could support exotic new electronic states.

Many of the surprises that arise in condensed-matter physics are a result of Coulomb interactions between charge carriers. Coulomb interactions play a crucial role in mediating magnetism, superconductivity and many other exotic phases of matter. The significance of these interactions is decreased as the kinetic energy of the particles in a system increases — one of the reasons that the phases they produce typically only arise at low temperatures. One way to counteract the effects of kinetic energy in a two-dimensional electron system is to apply a perpendicular magnetic field. At sufficient strengths, this field quantizes the electronic states of a system into Landau levels that are highly degenerate and which exhibit flat dispersion that gives rise, for example, to the fractional quantum Hall effect1. Writing in Nature Physics2,3,4, three groups describe an alternative approach to promoting Coulomb interactions. Heinz and colleagues2, Lau and colleagues3 and Zaliznyak and colleagues4 show that in multilayer graphene, the kinetic energy of particles may be reduced depending on how it's individual layers are stacked — a fact that could support a host of new states and exotic behaviours.

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Figure 1: Unlike monolayer and bilayer graphene, there are multiple ways of stacking three or more layers of graphene.

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  1. Amir Yacoby is in the Department of Physics, Harvard University, 11 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA,

    Amir Yacoby

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  1. Amir Yacoby
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Correspondence to Amir Yacoby.

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Yacoby, A. Tri and tri again. Nature Phys 7, 925–926 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2166

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