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Electrical switching of a bistable moiré superconductor

Nature Nanotechnology (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Electrical control of superconductivity is critical for nanoscale superconducting circuits including cryogenic memory elements1,2,3,4, superconducting field-effect transistors (FETs)5,6,7 and gate-tunable qubits8,9,10. Superconducting FETs operate through continuous tuning of carrier density, but no bistable superconducting FET, which could serve as a new type of cryogenic memory element, has been reported. Recently, gate hysteresis and resultant bistability in Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene aligned to its insulating hexagonal boron nitride gate dielectrics were discovered11,12. Here we report the observation of this same hysteresis in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) with aligned boron nitride layers. This bistable behaviour coexists alongside the strongly correlated electron system of MATBG without disrupting its correlated insulator or superconducting states. This all-van der Waals platform enables configurable switching between different electronic states of this rich system. To illustrate this new approach, we demonstrate reproducible bistable switching between the superconducting, metallic and correlated insulator states of MATBG using gate voltage or electric displacement field. These experiments unlock the potential to broadly incorporate this new switchable moiré superconductor into highly tunable superconducting electronics.

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Fig. 1: Device characterization.
Fig. 2: Dual-gate maps of longitudinal resistance.
Fig. 3: Characterization of robust superconductivity.
Fig. 4: Electrical switching of MATBG states and superconductivity.

Data availability

The data shown in the paper are available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FPHFDS. All other relevant data of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Q. Ma and Z. Zheng for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research 2DMAGIC MURI FA9550-19-1-0390 (D.R.K. and L.-Q.X.), the Army Research Office MURI W911NF2120147 (D.M.), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative through grant GBMF9463 to P.J.-H. K.W. and T.T. acknowledge support from the Elemental Strategy Initiative conducted by the MEXT, Japan (JPMXP0112101001), JSPS KAKENHI (JP20H00354), and the CREST(JPMJCR15F3), JST. This work made use of the MIT MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities, supported by the NSF (DMR-0819762), and of Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems, supported by the NSF (ECS-0335765).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dahlia R. Klein, Li-Qiao Xia, David MacNeill & Pablo Jarillo-Herrero

  2. Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Dahlia R. Klein

  3. National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    Kenji Watanabe & Takashi Taniguchi

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  1. Dahlia R. Klein
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  2. Li-Qiao Xia
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Contributions

D.R.K., L.-Q. X., D. M. and P.J.-H. conceived the project. D.R.K. and D.M. fabricated the devices. D.R.K., L.-Q. X. and D.M. carried out the transport measurements and analysed the data. K.W. and T.T. supplied the BN crystals. D.R.K., L.-Q. X., D. M. and P.J.-H. wrote the paper with input from all authors.

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Correspondence to Dahlia R. Klein or Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.

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Nature Nanotechnology thanks Kam Tuen Law and Emanuel Tutuc for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Klein, D.R., Xia, LQ., MacNeill, D. et al. Electrical switching of a bistable moiré superconductor. Nat. Nanotechnol. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01314-x

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