MIT physicists surprised to discover electrons in pentalayer graphene can exhibit fractional charge.
New theoretical research from MIT physicists explains how it could work, suggesting that electron interactions in confined two-dimensional spaces lead to novel quantum states, independent of magnetic fields.
MIT physicists have made significant progress in understanding how electrons can split into fractional charges. Their findings reveal the conditions that create exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional materials.
This new research builds on a recent discovery by another MIT team led by Assistant Professor Long Ju. Ju’s group observed that electrons seem to carry “fractional charges” in pentalayer graphene a structure made of five stacked graphene layers placed on a similar sheet of boron nitride.
Ju discovered that when he sent an electric current through the pentalayer structure, the electrons seemed to pass through as fractions of their total charge, even in the absence of a magnetic field. Scientists had already shown that electrons can split into fractions under a very strong magnetic field, in what is known as the fractional quantum Hall effect. Ju’s work was the first to find that this effect was possible in graphene without a magnetic field which until recently was not expected to exhibit such an effect.
The phenemonon was coined the “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect,” and theorists have been keen to find an explanation for how fractional charge can emerge from pentalayer graphene.
The new study, led by MIT professor of physics Senthil Todadri, provides a crucial piece of the answer. Through calculations of quantum mechanical interactions, he and his colleagues show that the electrons form a sort of crystal structure, the properties of which are ideal for fractions of electrons to emerge.
“This is a completely new mechanism, meaning in the decades-long history, people have never had a system go toward these kinds of fractional electron phenomena,” Todadri says. “It’s really exciting because it makes possible all kinds of new experiments that previously one could only dream about.”
In 2018, MIT professor of physics Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and his colleagues were the first to observe that new electronic behavior could emerge from stacking and twisting two sheets of graphene. Each layer of graphene is as thin as a single atom and structured in a chicken-wire lattice of hexagonal carbon atoms. By stacking two sheets at a very specific angle to each other, he found that the resulting interference, or moiré pattern, induced unexpected phenomena such as both superconducting and insulating properties in the same material. This “magic-angle graphene,” as it was soon coined, ignited a new field known as twistronics, the study of electronic behavior in twisted, two-dimensional materials.
“Shortly after his experiments, we realized these moiré systems would be ideal platforms in general to find the kinds of conditions that enable these fractional electron phases to emerge,” says Todadri, who collaborated with Jarillo-Herrero on a study that same year to show that, in theory, such twisted systems could exhibit fractional charge without a magnetic field. “We were advocating these as the best systems to look for these kinds of fractional phenomena,” he says.
Website: International Conference on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.
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