30°-Twisted Bilayer Graphene Quasicrystals from Chemical Vapor Deposition

Nano Lett. 2020 May 13;20(5):3313-3319. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.0c00172. Epub 2020 Apr 24.

Abstract

The artificial stacking of atomically thin crystals suffers from intrinsic limitations in terms of control and reproducibility of the relative orientation of exfoliated flakes. This drawback is particularly severe when the properties of the system critically depends on the twist angle, as in the case of the dodecagonal quasicrystal formed by two graphene layers rotated by 30°. Here we show that large-area 30°-rotated bilayer graphene can be grown deterministically by chemical vapor deposition on Cu, eliminating the need of artificial assembly. The quasicrystals are easily transferred to arbitrary substrates and integrated in high-quality hexagonal boron nitride-encapsulated heterostructures, which we process into dual-gated devices exhibiting carrier mobility up to 105 cm2/(V s). From low-temperature magnetotransport, we find that the graphene quasicrystals effectively behave as uncoupled graphene layers, showing 8-fold degenerate quantum Hall states. This result indicates that the Dirac cones replica detected by previous photoemission experiments do not contribute to the electrical transport.

Keywords: Twisted bilayer graphene; chemical vapor deposition; dodecagonal quasicrystals; quantum Hall effect.