Lecturer: Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero
Affiliation: Department of Physics, MIT
Abstract:
Over the past decade, the physics of low
dimensional electronic systems has been
revolutionized by the discovery of materials with
very unusual electronic properties where the
behavior of the electrons is governed by the Dirac
equation. Among these, graphene has taken center
stage due to its ultrarelativistic-like electron
dynamics and its potential applications in
nanotechnology. Moreover, recent advances in the
design and nanofabrication of heterostructures
based on van der Waals materials have enabled a
new generation of quantum electronic transport
experiments in graphene. In this talk I will describe
our recent experiments exploring electron-electron
interaction driven quantum phenomena in ultra-
high quality graphene-based van der Waals
heterostructures. In particular I will show two
novel realizations of a symmetry-protected
topological insulator state, specifically a quantum
spin Hall state, characterized by an insulating bulk
and conducting counterpropagating spin-polarized
states at the system edges. Our experiments
establish graphene-based heterostructures as
highly tunable systems to study topological
properties of condensed matter systems in the
regime of strong e-e interactions and I will end my
talk with an outlook of some of the exciting
directions in the field.