A family of finite-temperature electronic phase transitions in graphene multilayers.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30337406.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/science.aar6855.
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Abstract
Suspended Bernal-stacked graphene multilayers up to an unexpectedly large thickness exhibit a broken-symmetry ground state whose origin remains to be understood. We show that a finite-temperature second-order phase transition occurs in multilayers whose critical temperature (<i>T</i> <sub>c</sub>) increases from 12 kelvins (K) in bilayers to 100 K in heptalayers. A comparison of the data with a phenomenological model inspired by a mean-field approach suggests that the transition is associated with the appearance of a self-consistent valley- and spin-dependent staggered potential that changes sign from one layer to the next, appearing at <i>T</i> <sub>c</sub> and increasing upon cooling. The systematic evolution with thickness of several measured quantities imposes constraints on any microscopic theory aiming to analyze the nature of electronic correlations in this system.