Landau-level spectrum and the effect of spin-orbit coupling in monolayer graphene on transition metal dichalcogenides

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spin-orbit couplings influence Landau levels in graphene on transition metal dichalcogenides, providing a practical method to estimate SOC strengths from Landau fan diagrams.

Contribution

It introduces a simple theoretical model to analyze Landau level spectra affected by SOC, enabling estimation of SOC strengths from experimental data.

Findings

Landau levels are split and cross depending on SOC strengths.

Rashba SOC is stronger than spin-valley Zeeman SOC in the studied sample.

The method allows practical estimation of SOC parameters from Landau fan diagrams.

Abstract

In graphene on transition metal dichalcogenides, proximity-induced Rashba and spin-valley Zeeman SOCs can coexist that modify graphene's electronic band differently. Here, we show that the Landau levels (LLs) are also affected by these SOCs distinctively enough to estimate their relative strengths from the Landau fan diagram. Using a simple theoretical model, we calculated the LL spectrums of graphene for different SOC strengths, and found that when the total SOC is strong enough (i.e., when it is comparable to the half of the energy gap between the LLs of an intrinsic graphene), the corresponding LLs will split and cross with others depending sensitively on the relative strengths of the SOC terms. To demonstrate how one can use it to estimate the relative SOC strengths, we first identified the four key features that are well separated from the complex background and can be compared with experiment directly, and used them to show that in our sample, the Rashba SOC is stronger than the spin-valley Zeeman SOC that is consistent with other spectroscopic measurements. Our study therefore provides a simple and practical strategy to analyze the LL spectrum in graphene with SOC before carrying out more in-depth measurements.