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Vanishing bulk heat flow in the ν = 0 quantum Hall ferromagnet in monolayer graphene

Nature Physics volume 20, pages 1927–1932 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Undoped graphene is a gapless semiconductor; however, when placed under a high perpendicular magnetic field and cooled to low temperature, it develops an insulating state. This state, dubbed ν = 0, is due to the interplay between electronic interactions and the four-fold spin and valley degeneracies in the flat band formed by the n = 0 Landau level. The nature of the ground state of ν = 0, including its spin and valley polarization, is still under debate. Here we observe vanishing bulk thermal transport in monolayer at ν = 0, in contradiction with the expected ground state, which is predicted to have finite thermal conductance even at very low temperature. Our results highlight the need for further investigations on the nature of ν = 0.

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Fig. 1: ν = 0 ground states and graphene heat transport devices.
Fig. 2: Two-terminal heat transport at νc = 0.
Fig. 3: νc = 0 heat transport in the Corbino device.
Fig. 4: Large bias heat transport in the Corbino device.
Fig. 5: Two-terminal quantized edge heat transport in device 1.

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Data availability

The data shown here are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10528559 (ref. 45). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The analysis codes are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10528559 (ref. 45).

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the ERC (ERC-2018-STG QUAHQ), by the Investissements d’Avenir LabEx PALM (ANR-10-LABX-0039-PALM) and by the Region Ile de France through the DIM QUANTIP. K.W. and T.T. acknowledge support from the JSPS KAKENHI (grant numbers 21H05233 and 23H02052) and World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), MEXT, Japan. O.M. acknowledges funding from the ANR (ANR-23-CE47-0002 CRAQUANT). We thank A. Das, R. Kumar, S. K. Srivastav, M. Goerbig, T. Jolicoeur, C. Altimiras, R. Ribeiro-Palau, Y. Hong and P. Jacques for enlightening discussions as well as technical advice and support.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: R. Delagrange, M. Garg.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, CNRS, SPEC, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    R. Delagrange, M. Garg, G. Le Breton, A. Zhang, P. Roulleau, O. Maillet, P. Roche & F. D. Parmentier

  2. CryoHEMT, Orsay, France

    Q. Dong

  3. Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies (C2N), Palaiseau, France

    Y. Jin

  4. Research Center for Electronic and Optical Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    K. Watanabe

  5. Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    T. Taniguchi

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  1. R. Delagrange
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Contributions

F.D.P. conceived and designed the experiments. R.D., M.G. and F.D.P. fabricated the devices, with inputs from G.L.B. and A.Z. R.D., M.G., G.L.B., A.Z., O.M. and F.D.P. performed the experiments, analysed the data and discussed the results, with inputs from P. Roche. T.T. and K.W. synthesized the bulk hBN crystals. Q.D. and Y.J. provided the low-noise cryogenic preamplifiers used in the noise measurements. R.D., M.G., P. Roulleau, O.M., P. Roche and F.D.P. wrote the paper, with inputs from all co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to F. D. Parmentier.

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Nature Physics thanks Ganpathy Murthy, Haoxin Zhou and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Delagrange, R., Garg, M., Le Breton, G. et al. Vanishing bulk heat flow in the ν = 0 quantum Hall ferromagnet in monolayer graphene. Nat. Phys. 20, 1927–1932 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02672-0

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