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Orderly disorder in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene

Journal Article · · Science
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [1];  [8]
  1. Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
  2. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
  3. Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-0044, Japan.
  4. International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-0044, Japan.
  5. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.; School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
  6. Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
  7. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.; John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
  8. Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.; Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA.

Magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (TTG) has recently emerged as a platform to engineer strongly correlated flat bands. We reveal the normal-state structural and electronic properties of TTG using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy at twist angles for which superconductivity has been observed. Real trilayer samples undergo a strong reconstruction of the moiré lattice, which locks layers into near–magic-angle, mirror symmetric domains comparable in size with the superconducting coherence length. This relaxation introduces an array of localized twist-angle faults, termed twistons and moiré solitons, whose electronic structure deviates strongly from the background regions, leading to a doping-dependent, spatially granular electronic landscape. The Fermi-level density of states is maximally uniform at dopings for which superconductivity has been observed in transport measurements.

Research Organization:
Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
SC0019443
OSTI ID:
1980734
Journal Information:
Science, Vol. 376, Issue 6589; ISSN 0036-8075
Publisher:
AAAS
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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