Search for: All records

Anisotropic hopping in a toy Hofstadter model was recently invoked to explain a rich and surprising Landau spectrum measured in twisted bilayer graphene away from the magic angle. Suspecting that such anisotropy could arise from unintended uniaxial strain, we extend the Bistritzer–MacDonald model to include uniaxial heterostrain and present a detailed analysis of its impact on band structure and magnetotransport. We find that such strain strongly influences band structure, shifting the three otherwise-degenerate van Hove points to different energies. Coupled to a Boltzmann magnetotransport calculation, this reproduces previously unexplained nonsaturating$B^2$magnetoresistance over broad ranges of density near filling$\nu =\pm 2$and predicts subtler features that had not been noticed in the experimental data. In contrast to these distinctive signatures in longitudinal resistivity, the Hall coefficient is barely influenced by strain, to the extent that it still shows a single sign change on each side of the charge neutrality point—surprisingly, this sign change no longer occurs at a van Hove point. The theory also predicts a marked rotation of the electrical transport principal axes as a function of filling even for fixed strain and for rigid bands. More careful examination of interaction-induced nematic order versus strain effects in twisted bilayer graphene could thus be in order.

We present the design and implementation of a measurement system that enables parallel drive and detection of small currents and voltages at numerous electrical contacts to a multi-terminal electrical device. This system, which we term a feedback lock-in, combines digital control-loop feedback with software-defined lock-in measurements to dynamically source currents and measure small, pre-amplified potentials. The effective input impedance of each current/voltage probe can be set via software, permitting any given contact to behave as an open-circuit voltage lead or as a virtually grounded current source/sink. This enables programmatic switching of measurement configurations and permits measurement of currents at multiple drain contacts without the use of current preamplifiers. Our 32-channel implementation relies on commercially available digital input/output boards, home-built voltage preamplifiers, and custom open-source software. With our feedback lock-in, we demonstrate differential measurement sensitivity comparable to a widely used commercially available lock-in amplifier and perform efficient multi-terminal electrical transport measurements on twisted bilayer graphene and SrTiO3 quantum point contacts. The feedback lock-in also enables a new style of measurement using multiple current probes, which we demonstrate on a ballistic graphene device.

A key feature of the topological surface state under a magnetic field is the presence of the zeroth Landau level at the zero energy. Nonetheless, it is challenging to probe the zeroth Landau level due to large electron–hole puddles smearing its energy landscape. Here, by developing ultra‐low‐carrier density topological insulator Sb₂Te₃films, an extreme quantum limit of the topological surface state is reached and a hidden phase at the zeroth Landau level is uncovered. First, an unexpected quantum‐Hall‐to‐insulator‐transition near the zeroth Landau level is discovered. Then, through a detailed scaling analysis, it is found that this quantum‐Hall‐to‐insulator‐transition belongs to a new universality class, implying that the insulating phase discovered here has a fundamentally different origin from those in nontopological systems.