Superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene
Superconductividad en grafeno bicapa de ángulo mágico
- Date
- 2018 · confidence high
- Place
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Yuan Cao, Valla Fatemi, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group showed in 2018 that two graphene sheets twisted relative to each other by a “magic angle” of about 1.1° become correlated insulators and superconducting at about 1.7 K. It is a highly tunable system of strongly correlated electrons.
The magic angle was predicted theoretically by Bistritzer and MacDonald (2011). The finding belongs to the MIT group; Jarillo-Herrero, born in Valencia, is the Spanish figure. The critical temperature is low (1.7 K), but the interest lies in the nature of the state.
What it led to
- twistronics: control of properties through the twist angle
- moiré materials of transition-metal dichalcogenides
- study of unconventional superconductivity in few-band systems