Competition between spontaneous symmetry breaking and single-particle gaps in trilayer graphene

Y. Lee, D. Tran, K. Myhro, J. Velasco, N. Gillgren, C. N. Lau (), Y. Barlas, J. M. Poumirol, D. Smirnov and F. Guinea
Additional contact information
Y. Lee: University of California, Riverside
D. Tran: University of California, Riverside
K. Myhro: University of California, Riverside
J. Velasco: University of California, Riverside
N. Gillgren: University of California, Riverside
C. N. Lau: University of California, Riverside
Y. Barlas: University of California, Riverside
J. M. Poumirol: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
D. Smirnov: National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
F. Guinea: ICMM—CSIC

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-5

Abstract: Abstract Many physical phenomena can be understood by single-particle physics; that is, treating particles as non-interacting entities. When this fails, many-body interactions lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking and phenomena such as fundamental particles’ mass generation, superconductivity and magnetism. Competition between single-particle and many-body physics leads to rich phase diagrams. Here we show that rhombohedral-stacked trilayer graphene offers an exciting platform for studying such interplay, in which we observe a giant intrinsic gap ~42 meV that can be partially suppressed by an interlayer potential, a parallel magnetic field or a critical temperature ~36 K. Among the proposed correlated phases with spatial uniformity, our results are most consistent with a layer antiferromagnetic state with broken time reversal symmetry. These results reflect the interplay between externally induced and spontaneous symmetry breaking whose relative strengths are tunable by external fields, and provide insight into other low-dimensional systems.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6656 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6656

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6656

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().