Speaker
Description
Our current technological platforms are grounded in a thorough understanding of material band structures and their direct implications for electronic and optoelectronic properties. Modifying the band structure of naturally occurring materials is a complex endeavor, and commonly used experimental techniques such as strain, pressure, and crystal structure engineering often results in only minor adjustments to band gaps, effective masses, and other key material parameters. One of the recent platforms in this respect is the field of moire materials, where two dimensional (2D) materials twisted or hetero-stacked can lead to a variety of exotic properties including superconductivity and other exotic states such as Chern insulators, orbital ferromagnets, and nematic phases. In this talk, I shall highlight various facets of many body correlations that we have explored using a combination of transport techniques in moire graphene. I will also touch upon an alternative experiment to develop a new metamaterials platform using Bernal bilayer graphene, where external, modulated electrostatic gate potentials can be used as a tunable knob to engineer superlattices and flat electronic bands. The results highlight new routes to band engineering, potentially extendable to complex periodic structures that are untenable in natural materials.