Transport properties of novel Van der Waals materials

Abstract

This work is dedicated to electron transport in novel van der Waals materials. In the first half of this work, I discuss the electron transport properties of graphene encapsulated between two hexagonal boron nitride crystals. Recent studies of this structure revealed that electrons in graphene exhibit a fluid-like behaviour. In this thesis, I extend the studies of graphene electron fluids to include the effect of a magnetic field. We report the violation of the Hall effect due to the presence of the odd/Hall viscosity in such unconventional fluid. Then I turn our attention to graphene superlattices, such as twisted bilayer graphene. Here we show that the properties of this structure are qualitatively different for different twist angles. When the twist angle is relatively high, this system supports micrometre scale ballistic transport, which allowed us to observe the transverse magnetic focusing effect and study the effects of the displacement field in such a system. In a small angle limit, when the twist angle is about 0.1 degree, we found that all the current propagates through the network of one-dimensional channels, which is unique to this type of system.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Andre Geim (Supervisor) & Irina Grigorieva (Supervisor)