Tunable Sample-wide Electronic Kagome Lattice in Low-angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene

TL;DR

This study reveals that in low-angle twisted bilayer graphene, pseudo-Landau levels form robust Kagome lattices despite structural reconstruction, enabling tunable electronic properties and opening new avenues for exploring correlated phases.

Contribution

It demonstrates the formation of tunable, sample-wide electronic Kagome lattices in twisted bilayer graphene around the magic angle, even with structural reconstruction.

Findings

Pseudo-Landau levels are robust across a range of twist angles.

Structural reconstruction suppresses Kagome lattice formation in tiny-angle TBG.

Tunable Kagome lattices are directly imaged near the magic angle.

Abstract

Overlaying two graphene layers with a small twist angle can create a moire superlattice to realize exotic phenomena that are entirely absent in graphene monolayer. A representative example is the predicted formation of localized pseudo-Landau levels (PLLs) with Kagome lattice in tiny-angle twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) with theta < 0.3 deg when the graphene layers are subjected to different electrostatic potentials. However, this was shown only for the model of rigidly rotated TBG which is not realized in reality due to an interfacial structural reconstruction. It is believed that the interfacial structural reconstruction strongly inhibits the formation of the PLLs. Here, we systematically study electronic properties of the TBG with 0.075 deg < theta < 1.2 deg and demonstrate, unexpectedly, that the PLLs are quite robust for all the studied TBG. The structural reconstruction suppresses the formation of the emergent Kagome lattice in the tiny-angle TBG. However, for the TBG around magic angle, the sample-wide electronic Kagome lattices with tunable lattice constants are directly imaged by using scanning tunneling microscope. Our observations open a new direction to explore exotic correlated phases in moire systems.