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Broken-symmetry states and divergent resistance in suspended bilayer graphene

Nature Physics volume 5, pages 889–893 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Mono- and bilayer graphene have generated tremendous excitement owing to their unique and potentially useful electronic properties1. Suspending single-layer graphene flakes above the substrate2,3 has been shown to greatly improve sample quality, yielding high-mobility devices with little charge inhomogeneity. Here we report the fabrication of suspended bilayer graphene devices with very little disorder. We observe quantum Hall states that are fully quantized at a magnetic field of 0.2 T, as well as broken-symmetry states at intermediate filling factors ν=0, ±1, ±2 and ±3. In the ν=0 state, the devices show extremely high magnetoresistance that scales as magnetic field divided by temperature. This resistance is predominantly affected by the perpendicular component of the applied field, and the extracted energy gap is significantly larger than expected for Zeeman splitting. These findings indicate that the broken-symmetry states arise from many-body interactions and underscore the important part that Coulomb interactions play in bilayer graphene.

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Figure 1: Characterization of suspended bilayer samples S3 (blue) and S4 (red) at zero magnetic field.
Figure 2: Splitting of the eightfold-degenerate Landau level in suspended bilayers.
Figure 3: Temperature and field dependence of the ν=0 state.
Figure 4: Scaling of the maximum resistance in the ν=0 state.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge discussions with L. S. Levitov, R. Nandkishore, D. A. Abanin, A. H. Castro Neto, A. H. MacDonald, M. S. Rudner and S. Sachdev. We acknowledge support from Harvard NSEC, the ONR MURI program and Harvard CNS, a member of the NNIN, which is supported by the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

    Benjamin E. Feldman, Jens Martin & Amir Yacoby

Authors
  1. Benjamin E. Feldman
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  2. Jens Martin
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  3. Amir Yacoby
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Contributions

B.E.F. conceived and designed the experiments, fabricated samples, carried out the experiments and data analysis and wrote the paper. J.M. conceived and designed the experiments, carried out the experiments and data analysis and wrote the paper. A.Y. conceived and designed the experiments, carried out data analysis and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amir Yacoby.

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Feldman, B., Martin, J. & Yacoby, A. Broken-symmetry states and divergent resistance in suspended bilayer graphene. Nature Phys 5, 889–893 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1406

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