Feng Wang - “Designing Artificial Quantum Materials with van der Waals Heterostructures"

Stanford University
APPLIED PHYSICS/PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM
Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Feng Wang
UC-Berkeley
“Designing Artificial Quantum Materials with van der Waals Heterostructures”
Van der Waals heterostructures of atomically thin crystals offer an exciting new platform to design artificial quantum materials with novel and tunable quantum phases. In this talk, I will describe a general approach to engineer correlated and topological physics using moire superlattice in two dimensional heterostructures. One example is the transition metal dichalcogenide moire sueprlattices, where a rich set correlated insulator and generalized Wigner crystal states can be observed. The other example is the ABC trilayer graphene (TLG) and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) moire superlattice, where both the bandwidth and the topology of the electronic band can be controlled electrically. It enables the realization of many quantum phases, ranging from Mott insulator and superconductivity to orbital ferromagnetism and Chern insulator, all in a single device through electrostatic gating.