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Condensed-Matter Physics

Richard Brierley: correlated materials, many-body physics and solid state qubits.

Wei Fan: topological matter and superconductivity.

Konstantin Hirsch: magnetism and spintronics.

Silvia Milana: physics of two-dimensional materials.

Welcome to the Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights webpage on condensed-matter physics. Each month our editors select a small number of Articles recently published in Nature Communications that they believe are particularly interesting or important.

The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the area of condensed-matter physics at Nature Communications.

Make sure to check the Editors' Highlights page each month for new featured articles.

Quantum-dot assisted spectroscopy of degeneracy-lifted Landau levels in graphene

Here, the authors develop a spectroscopic technique whereby individual defects in an ultrathin hBN dielectric, placed in proximity to graphene, act as quantum dots. Dot-assisted tunneling is highly sensitive to the nearby graphene excitation spectrum, and allows probing of energy splitting in the excited Landau levels.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Electrical switching between exciton dissociation to exciton funneling in MoSe2/WS2 heterostructure

The ultrafast carrier dynamics across the van der Waals interface of transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures govern the formation and funnelling of excitons. Here, the authors demonstrate a reversible switch from exciton dissociation to exciton funnelling in a MoSe2/WS2 heterostructure, which manifests itself as a photoluminescence quenching-to-enhancement transition.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Controlling interlayer excitons in MoS2 layers grown by chemical vapor deposition

The authors investigate the interplay between the stacking order and the interlayer coupling in MoS2 homobilayers as well as artificially stacked bilayers grown by chemical vapour deposition, and identify the interlayer exciton absorption and A-B exciton separation as indicators for interlayer coupling.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

The optical conductivity of few-layer black phosphorus by infrared spectroscopy

For many two-dimensional semiconductors, such as MoS2, the exciton absorption increases with thickness. Here, the authors show that, in black phosphorus, less material absorbs more light due to exciton resonances.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Ultra-long carrier lifetime in neutral graphene-hBN van der Waals heterostructures under mid-infrared illumination

Long carrier lifetimes are beneficial for graphene-based optoelectronics, but carrier recombination processes in graphene possess sub-picosecond characteristic times. Here, the authors report carrier lifetimes ~30 ps at low energy in graphene/hBN Zener-Klein transistors, attributed to interband Auger processes.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Polarized resonant emission of monolayer WS2 coupled with plasmonic sawtooth nanoslit array

Here the authors show that WS2 coupled with a plasmonic sawtooth nanoslit array is an efficient exciton-plasmon hybrid system which enables polarization modulation of the excitonic emission at the nanoscale up to 80% and observation of valley coherence at room temperature.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Large-area, periodic, and tunable intrinsic pseudo-magnetic fields in low-angle twisted bilayer graphene

Precisely strained graphene layers can enable observation of periodic pseudo-magnetic fields with high symmetry. Here, the authors report experimental tuning of large area periodic pseudo-magnetic fields within twisted bilayer graphene and massive Dirac electrons having circularly localized pseudo-Landau levels.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Ultra-thin van der Waals crystals as semiconductor quantum wells

A plethora of solid-state nanodevices rely on engineering the quantization of electrons in quantum wells. Here, the authors leverage the thickness of exfoliated 2D crystals to control the quantum well dimensions in few-layer semiconductor InSe and investigate the resonance features in the tunnelling current, photoabsorption and light emission spectra.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Carrier multiplication in van der Waals layered transition metal dichalcogenides

During carrier multiplication, high-energy free carriers in a given material relax by generation of additional electron-hole pairs. Here, the authors report evidence of carrier multiplication in multilayer MoTe2 and WSe2 films with up to 99% conversation efficiency.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Enhanced light-matter interaction in an atomically thin semiconductor coupled with dielectric nano-antennas

Dielectric nano-antennas may be used as a platform for boosting light-matter coupling in 2D semiconductors. Here, the authors demonstrate the coupling of atomically thin WSe \$\${}_{2}\$\$ $2$ with low-loss, high-refractive-index GaP nano-antennas and observe a 10000-fold WSe \$\${}_{2}\$\$ $2$ photoluminescence enhancement.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications