Trapped substances between a two-dimensional (2D) crystal and an atomically flat substrate lead to the formation of bubbles. Their size, shape and internal pressure are determined by the competition ...between van der Waals attraction of the crystal to the substrate and the elastic energy needed to deform it, allowing to use bubbles to study elastic properties of 2D crystals and conditions of confinement. Using atomic force microscopy, we analysed a variety of bubbles formed by monolayers of graphene, boron nitride and MoS2. Their shapes are found to exhibit universal scaling, in agreement with our analysis based on the theory of elasticity of membranes. We also measured the hydrostatic pressure induced by the confinement, which was found to reach tens of MPa inside submicron bubbles. This agrees with our theory estimates and suggests that for even smaller, sub-10 nm bubbles the pressure can be close to 1 GPa and may modify properties of a trapped material.
Graphene hosts a unique electron system in which electron-phonon scattering is extremely weak but electron-electron collisions are sufficiently frequent to provide local equilibrium above the ...temperature of liquid nitrogen. Under these conditions, electrons can behave as a viscous liquid and exhibit hydrodynamic phenomena similar to classical liquids. Here we report strong evidence for this transport regime. We found that doped graphene exhibits an anomalous (negative) voltage drop near current-injection contacts, which is attributed to the formation of submicrometer-size whirlpools in the electron flow. The viscosity of graphene's electron liquid is found to be ~0.1 square meters per second, an order of magnitude higher than that of honey, in agreement with many-body theory. Our work demonstrates the possibility of studying electron hydrodynamics using high-quality graphene.
Epitaxial films may be released from growth substrates and transferred to structurally and chemically incompatible substrates, but epitaxial films of transition metal perovskite oxides have not been ...transferred to electroactive substrates for voltage control of their myriad functional properties. Here we demonstrate good strain transmission at the incoherent interface between a strain-released film of epitaxially grown ferromagnetic La
Sr
MnO
and an electroactive substrate of ferroelectric 0.68Pb(Mg
Nb
)O
-0.32PbTiO
in a different crystallographic orientation. Our strain-mediated magnetoelectric coupling compares well with respect to epitaxial heterostructures, where the epitaxy responsible for strong coupling can degrade film magnetization via strain and dislocations. Moreover, the electrical switching of magnetic anisotropy is repeatable and non-volatile. High-resolution magnetic vector maps reveal that micromagnetic behaviour is governed by electrically controlled strain and cracks in the film. Our demonstration should inspire others to control the physical/chemical properties in strain-released epitaxial oxide films by using electroactive substrates to impart strain via non-epitaxial interfaces.
Cyclotron motion of charge carriers in metals and semiconductors leads to Landau quantization and magneto-oscillatory behavior in their properties. Cryogenic temperatures are usually required to ...observe these oscillations. We show that graphene superlattices support a different type of quantum oscillation that does not rely on Landau quantization. The oscillations are extremely robust and persist well above room temperature in magnetic fields of only a few tesla. We attribute this phenomenon to repetitive changes in the electronic structure of superlattices such that charge carriers experience effectively no magnetic field at simple fractions of the flux quantum per superlattice unit cell. Our work hints at unexplored physics in Hofstadter butterfly systems at high temperatures.
It is well-known that superconductivity in thin films is generally suppressed with decreasing thickness. This suppression is normally governed by either disorder-induced localization of Cooper pairs, ...weakening of Coulomb screening, or generation and unbinding of vortex–antivortex pairs as described by the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) theory. Defying general expectations, few-layer NbSe2, an archetypal example of ultrathin superconductors, has been found to remain superconducting down to monolayer thickness. Here, we report measurements of both the superconducting energy gap Δ and critical temperature T C in high-quality monocrystals of few-layer NbSe2, using planar-junction tunneling spectroscopy and lateral transport. We observe a fully developed gap that rapidly reduces for devices with the number of layers N ≤ 5, as does their T C. We show that the observed reduction cannot be explained by disorder, and the BKT mechanism is also excluded by measuring its transition temperature that for all N remains very close to T C. We attribute the observed behavior to changes in the electronic band structure predicted for mono- and bi- layer NbSe2 combined with inevitable suppression of the Cooper pair density at the superconductor-vacuum interface. Our experimental results for N > 2 are in good agreement with the dependences of Δ and T C expected in the latter case while the effect of band-structure reconstruction is evidenced by a stronger suppression of Δ and the disappearance of its anisotropy for N = 2. The spatial scale involved in the surface suppression of the density of states is only a few angstroms but cannot be ignored for atomically thin superconductors.
Many layered materials can be cleaved down to individual atomic planes, similar to graphene, but only a small minority of them are stable under ambient conditions. The rest react and decompose in ...air, which has severely hindered their investigation and potential applications. Here we introduce a remedial approach based on cleavage, transfer, alignment, and encapsulation of air-sensitive crystals, all inside a controlled inert atmosphere. To illustrate the technology, we choose two archetypal two-dimensional crystals that are of intense scientific interest but are unstable in air: black phosphorus and niobium diselenide. Our field-effect devices made from their monolayers are conductive and fully stable under ambient conditions, which is in contrast to the counterparts processed in air. NbSe2 remains superconducting down to the monolayer thickness. Starting with a trilayer, phosphorene devices reach sufficiently high mobilities to exhibit Landau quantization. The approach offers a venue to significantly expand the range of experimentally accessible two-dimensional crystals and their heterostructures.
It is well-known that superconductivity in thin films is generally suppressed with decreasing thickness. This suppression is normally governed by either disorder-induced localization of Cooper pairs, ...weakening of Coulomb screening, or generation and unbinding of vortex-antivortex pairs as described by the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) theory. Defying general expectations, few-layer NbSe
, an archetypal example of ultrathin superconductors, has been found to remain superconducting down to monolayer thickness. Here, we report measurements of both the superconducting energy gap Δ and critical temperature T
in high-quality monocrystals of few-layer NbSe
, using planar-junction tunneling spectroscopy and lateral transport. We observe a fully developed gap that rapidly reduces for devices with the number of layers N ≤ 5, as does their T
. We show that the observed reduction cannot be explained by disorder, and the BKT mechanism is also excluded by measuring its transition temperature that for all N remains very close to T
. We attribute the observed behavior to changes in the electronic band structure predicted for mono- and bi- layer NbSe
combined with inevitable suppression of the Cooper pair density at the superconductor-vacuum interface. Our experimental results for N > 2 are in good agreement with the dependences of Δ and T
expected in the latter case while the effect of band-structure reconstruction is evidenced by a stronger suppression of Δ and the disappearance of its anisotropy for N = 2. The spatial scale involved in the surface suppression of the density of states is only a few angstroms but cannot be ignored for atomically thin superconductors.
We experimentally demonstrate strong exciton-photon coupling in a MoSe2/hBN heterostructure interfaced with an all-dielectric metasurface supporting high-Q bound states in the continuum. The ...resulting exciton-polaritons are probed by means of temperature- and angle-resolved reflectivity and photoluminescence. Our findings pave the way towards new-generation nonlinear planar polaritonic devices.
Graphene on hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is an atomically flat conducting system that is ideally suited for probing the effect of Zeeman splitting on electron transport. We demonstrate by ...magnetotransport measurements that a parallel magnetic field up to 30 Tesla does not affect the transport properties of graphene on h-BN even at charge neutrality where such an effect is expected to be maximal. The only magnetoresistance detected at low carrier concentrations is shown to be associated with a small perpendicular component of the field which cannot be fully eliminated in the experiment. Despite the high mobility of charge carriers at low temperatures, we argue that the effects of Zeeman splitting are fully masked by electrostatic potential fluctuations at charge neutrality.
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