Search

At certain angles of rotation called `magic angles' twisted bilayer graphene features almost flat bands. The resulting strong correlations drive the system to novel phases which have been observed in experiments recently. A complete understanding of the `magic' angle physics---both at the single-particle as well as the many-particle level---is still missing, and the search is ongoing. Here, we identify a new set of `magic' angles, where locally flat bands with a variety of possible many-body instabilities arise, but where the single-particle problem admits an exact solution. This occurs in the presence of an external perpendicular electric field at multicritical Lifshitz points. At these angles, which can be quantified exactly, the central band features a monkey saddle, resulting in strong electronic correlations., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Incommensurately twisted graphene bilayers are described by long-wavelength theories, but to date such theories exist only at small angles of interlayer rotation. We construct a long wavelength theory without such a restriction, instead requiring nearness to commensuration. The theory inherits its energy scale from the exactly commensurate bilayer that it is close to. It is a spatial interpolation between the low-energy theories of commensurate structures with the two possible sublattice exchange (SE) symmetries: SE even and SE odd. In addition to generalizing existing theories, our theory brings into experimental reach so far elusive commensuration physics in graphene such as band gaps and nontrivial band topology.

We investigate the shot noise of an impurity-free graphene flake as a function of the chemical potential. For large width to length ratios, this noise has been predicted and observed to exhibit universal characteristics at the Dirac point. Furthermore, a sharp decrease of the shot noise with increasing carrier density has been predicted. This decrease has also been observed in experiments, but with much smaller slope than predicted. We reconcile this discrepancy between theory and experiment by including the effects of the contacts to the graphene ribbon., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

In this letter, we examine the role of Coulomb interactions in the emergence of macroscopically ordered states in graphene supported on hexagonal boron nitride substrates. Due to incommensuration effects with the substrate, graphene can develop gapped low energy modes that spatially conform into a triangular superlattice of quantum rings. In the presence of these modes, we show that Coulomb interactions lead to spontaneous formation of chiral loop currents in bulk and to macroscopic spin-valley order at zero temperature. We show that this exotic state breaks time reversal symmetry and can be detected with interferometry and polar Kerr measurements., Comment: 4.5 pages + supplementary materials; additional changes and references included

We show that valley degeneracy in rotationally faulted multilayer graphene may be broken in the presence of a magnetic field and interlayer commensurations. This happens due to a simultaneous breaking of both time-reversal and inversion symmetries leading to a splitting of Landau levels linear in the field. Our theoretical work is motivated by an experiment [Y. J. Song et al., Nature 467, 185 (2010)] on epitaxially grown multilayer graphene where such linear splitting of Landau levels was observed at moderate fields. We consider both bilayer and trilayer configurations and, although a linear splitting occurs in both cases, we show that the latter produces a splitting that is in quantitative agreement with the experiment.

While the experimental progress on three dimensional topological insulators is rapid, the development of their two dimensional counterparts has been comparatively slow, despite their technological promise. The main reason is materials challenges of the to date only realizations of two-dimensional topological insulators, in semiconductor quantum wells. Here we identify a two dimensional topological insulator in a material which does not face similar challenges and which is by now most widely available and well-charaterized: graphene. For certain commensurate interlayer twists graphene multilayers are insulators with sizable bandgaps. We show that they are moreover in a topological phase protected by crystal symmetry. As its fundamental signature, this topological state supports one-dimensional boundary modes. They form low-dissipation quantum wires that can be defined purely electrostatically., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

In this Letter, we derive an effective theory of graphene on a hexagonal Boron Nitride (h-BN) substrate. We show that the h-BN substrate generically opens a spectral gap in graphene despite the lattice mismatch. The origin of that gap is particularly intuitive in the regime of strong coupling between graphene and its substrate, when the low-energy physics is determined by the topology of a network of zero energy modes. For twisted graphene bilayers, where inversion symmetry is present, this network percolates through the system and the spectrum is gapless. The breaking of that symmetry by h-BN causes the zero energy modes to close into rings. The eigenstates of these rings hybridize into flat bands with gaps in between. The size of this band gap can be tuned by a gate voltage and it can reach the order of magnitude needed to confine electrons at room temperature., Comment: 4.1 pages, 4 figures

Interlayer coupling in rotationally faulted graphene multilayers breaks the local sublattice-symmetry of the individual layers. Earlier we have presented a theory of this mechanism, which reduces to an effective Dirac model with space-dependent mass in an important limit. It thus makes a wealth of existing knowledge available for the study of rotationally faulted graphene multilayers. Agreement of this theory with a recent experiment in a strong magnetic field was demonstrated. Here we explore some of the predictions of this theory for the system in zero magnetic field at large interlayer bias, when it becomes local in space. We use that theory to illuminate the physics of localization and velocity renormalization in twisted graphene bilayers., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1009.4492

We calculate the shot noise generated by evanescent modes in graphene for several experimental setups. For two impurity-free graphene strips kept at the Dirac point by gate potentials, separated by a long highly doped region, we find that the Fano factor takes the universal value F = 1/4. For a large superlattice consisting of many strips gated to the Dirac point interspersed among doped regions, we find F = 1/(8 ln 2). These results differ from the value F = 1/3 predicted for a disordered metal, providing an unambiguous experimental signature of evanescent mode transport in graphene., Comment: Added references

We study the Landau quantization of the electronic spectrum for graphene bilayers that are rotationally faulted to produce periodic superlattices. Commensurate twisted bilayers exist in two families distinguished by their sublattice exchange parity. We show that these two families exhibit distinct Landau quantized spectra distinguished both by the interlayer coupling of their zero modes and by an amplitude modulation of their spectra at energies above their low energy interlayer coherence scales. These modulations can provide a powerful experimental probe of the magnitude of a weak coherence splitting in a bilayer and its low energy mass structure., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

Interlayer coupling in rotationally faulted graphene multilayers breaks the local sublattice-symmetry of the individual layers. We present a theory of this mechanism, which reduces to an effective Dirac model with space-dependent mass in an important limit. It thus makes a wealth of existing knowledge available for the study of rotationally faulted graphene multilayers. We demonstrate quantitative agreement between our theory and a recent experiment., Comment: Valley dependence in Eqs. (2) and (7) corrected; coordinates x and y interchanged in the appendix

We analyze the scattering from one-dimensional defects in intrinsic graphene. The Coulomb repulsion between electrons is found to be able to induce singularities of such scattering at zero temperature as in one-dimensional conductors. In striking contrast to electrons in one space dimension, however, repulsive interactions here can enhance transport. We present explicit calculations for the scattering from vector potentials that appear when strips of the material are under strain. There the predicted effects are exponentially large for strong scatterers., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

We investigate an effective low energy theory of HgTe quantum wells near their mass inversion thickness in a perpendicular magnetic field. By comparison of the effective band structure with a more elaborated and well-established model, the parameter regime and the validity of the effective model is scrutinized. Optical transitions in HgTe quantum wells are analyzed. We find selection rules which we functionalize to optically manipulate edge state transport. Qualitatively, our findings equally apply to optical edge current manipulation in graphene.

We propose a way of producing and detecting pseudospin entanglement between electrons and holes in graphene. Electron-hole pairs are produced by a fluctuating potential and their entanglement is demonstrated by a current correlation measurement. The chirality of electrons in graphene facilitates a well-controlled Bell test with (pseudo-)spin projection angles defined in real space., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures; v2 with slightly modified abstract and introduction

We show that exchange interactions in two-dimensional electron gases out of equilibrium can generate a fictitious vector potential with intriguing signatures in interference and Hall measurements. Detailed predictions are made for graphene, where the effect is enhanced by pseudospin exchange., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

We study theoretically the parallel quantum wires of the experiment by Auslaender et al. [Science 308, 88 (2005)] at low electron density. It is shown that a Hall effect as observed in two- or three-dimensional electron systems develops as one of the two wires enters the spin-incoherent regime of small spin bandwidth. This together with magnetic field dependent tunneling exponents clearly identifies spin-incoherence in such experiments and it serves to distinguish it from disorder effects., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, missing summation added to Eq. (6), more thorough discussion of the experimental signatures

We show that the scaling exponent for tunneling into a quantum wire in the "Coulomb Tonks gas" regime of impenetrable, but otherwise free, electrons is affected by impurity scattering in the wire. The exponent for tunneling into such a wire thus depends on the conductance through the wire. This striking effect originates from a many-body scattering resonance reminiscent of the Kondo effect. The predicted anomalous scaling is stable against weak perturbations of the ideal Tonks gas limit at sufficiently high energies, similar to the phenomenology of a quantum critical point., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; slightly extended version of the published article

We study tunneling of electrons into and between interacting wires in the spin-incoherent regime subject to a magnetic field. The tunneling currents follow power laws of the applied voltage with exponents that depend on whether the electron spins at the relevant length scales are polarized or disordered. The crossover length (or energy) scale is exponential in the applied field. In a finite size wire multiple crossovers can occur., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures

We show that interference experiments can be used to identify the spin-incoherent regime of strongly interacting one-dimensional conductors. Two qualitative signatures of spin-incoherence are found: a strong magnetic field dependence of the interference contrast and an anomalous scaling of the interference contrast with the applied voltage, with a temperature and magnetic field dependent scaling exponent. The experiments distinguish the spin-incoherent from the spin-polarized regime, and so may be useful in deciding between alternative explanations proposed for the anomalous conductance quantization observed in quantum point contacts and quantum wires at low density., Comment: reference added, typos corrected

We propose a measure of interaction-induced ground state entanglement in many-fermion systems that is experimentally accessible. It is formulated in terms of cross-correlations of currents through resonant fermion levels weakly coupled to the probed system. The proposed entanglement measure vanishes in the absence of many-body interactions and it is related to measures of occupation number entanglement. We evaluate it for two examples of interacting electronic nanostructures., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published version

We show that a shot noise free current at conductance below 2 e^2/h is possible in short interacting quantum wires without spin-polarization. Our calculation is done for two exactly solvable limits of the ``Coulomb Tonks gas'', a one-dimensional gas of impenetrable electrons that can be realized in ultra-thin quantum wires. In both cases we find that charge transport through such a wire is noiseless at zero temperature while the conductance is reduced to e^2/h., Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure

We propose a detector to read out the state of a single nuclear spin, with potential application in future scalable NMR quantum computers. It is based on a ``spin valve'' between bulk nuclear spin systems that is highly sensitive to the state of the measured spin. We suggest a concrete realization of that detector in a Silicon lattice. Transport of spin through the proposed spin valve is analogous to that of charge through an electronic nanostructure, but exhibits distinctive new features., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

We study the AC conductance and equilibrium current fluctuations of a Coulomb blockaded quantum dot. A relation between the equilibrium spectral function and the linear AC conductance is derived which is valid for frequencies well below the charging energy of the quantum dot. Frequency-dependent transport measurements can thus give experimental access to the Kondo peak in the equilibrium spectral function of a quantum dot. We illustrate this in detail for typical experimental parameters using the numerical renormalization group method in combination with the Kubo formalism., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

We study correlations of spin currents flowing through a Coulomb blockaded quantum dot. While vanishing for elastic co-tunneling, these correlations develop as the quantum dot enters the Kondo regime. They are a manifestation of Kondo physics in quantum dots. We demonstrate that the spin current correlator is non-perturbative in the Kondo coupling., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

It is known that a quantum computer operating on electron-spin qubits with single-electron Hamiltonians and assisted by single-spin measurements can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer. We show that the exponential speed-up of quantum algorithms is restored if single-charge measurements are added. These enable the construction of a CNOT (controlled NOT) gate for free fermions, using only beam splitters and spin rotations. The gate is nearly deterministic if the charge detector counts the number of electrons in a mode, and fully deterministic if it only measures the parity of that number., Comment: 5 pages including 3 figures

We develop a linear response formalism for nuclear spin diffusion in a dipolar coupled solid. The theory applies to the high-temperature, long-wavelength regime studied in the recent experiments of Boutis et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 137201 (2004)], which provided direct measurement of interspin energy diffusion in such a system. A systematic expansion of Kubo's formula in the flip-flop term of the Hamiltonian is used to calculate the diffusion coefficients. We show that this approach is equivalent to the method of Lowe and Gade [Phys. Rev. 156, 817 (1967)] and Kaplan [Phys. Rev. B 2, 4578 (1970)], but has several calculational and conceptual advantages. Although the lowest orders in this expansion agree with the experimental results for magnetization diffusion, this is not the case for energy diffusion. Possible reasons for this disparity are suggested., Comment: 7 pages, REVTeX4; Published Version

A method to calculate the statistics of energy exchange between quantum systems is presented. The generating function of this statistics is expressed through a Keldysh path integral. The method is first applied to the problem of heat dissipation from a biased mesoscopic conductor into the adjacent reservoirs. We then consider energy dissipation in an electrical circuit around a mesoscopic conductor. We derive the conditions under which measurements of the fluctuations of heat dissipation can be used to investigate higher order cumulants of the charge counting statistics of a mesoscopic conductor., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Building on a previous proposal for the entanglement of electron-hole pairs in the Fermi sea, we show how 3 qubits can be entangled without using electron-electron interactions. As in the 2-qubit case, this electronic scheme works even if the sources are in (local) thermal equilibrium -- in contrast to the photonic analogue. The 3 qubits are represented by 4 edge-channel excitations in the quantum Hall effect (2 hole excitations plus 2 electron excitations with identical channel index). The entangler consists of an adiabatic point contact flanked by a pair of tunneling point contacts. The irreducible 3-qubit entanglement is characterized by the tangle, which is expressed in terms of the transmission matrices of the tunneling point contacts. The maximally entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state is obtained for channel-independent tunnel probabilities. We show how low-frequency noise measurements can be used to determine an upper and lower bound to the tangle. The bounds become tighter the closer the electron-hole state is to the GHZ state., Comment: 8 pages including 4 figures; [2017: fixed broken postscript figures]

It has recently been shown theoretically that elastic scattering in the Fermi sea produces quantum mechanically entangled states. The mechanism is similar to entanglement by a beam splitter in optics, but a key distinction is that the electronic mechanism works even if the source is in local thermal equilibrium. An experimental realization was proposed using tunneling between two edge channels in a strong magnetic field. Here we investigate a low-magnetic field alternative, using multiple scattering in a quantum dot. Two pairs of single-channel point contacts define a pair of qubits. If the scattering is chaotic, a universal statistical description of the entanglement production (quantified by the concurrence) is possible. The mean concurrence turns out to be almost independent on whether time-reversal symmetry is broken or not. We show how the concurrence can be extracted from a Bell inequality using low-frequency noise measurements, without requiring the tunneling assumption of earlier work., Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, Kluwer style file included

A tunnel barrier in a degenerate electron gas was recently discovered as a source of entangled electron-hole pairs. Here, we investigate the loss of entanglement by dephasing. We calculate both the maximal violation E_max of the Bell inequality and the degree of entanglement (concurrence) C. If the initially maximally entangled electron-hole pair is in a Bell state, then the Bell inequality is violated for arbitrary strong dephasing. The same relation E_max=2\sqrt{1+C^{2}} then holds as in the absence of dephasing. More generally, for a maximally entangled superposition of Bell states, the Bell inequality is satisfied for a finite dephasing strength and the entanglement vanishes for somewhat stronger (but still finite) dephasing strength. There is then no one-to-one relation between E_max and C., Comment: 7 pages with 3 figures, special style file included; To appear in a special issue on "Quantum Computation at the Atomic Scale" in Turkish Journal of Physics

A tunnel barrier in a degenerate electron gas was recently discovered as a source of entangled particle-hole excitations. The entanglement is produced by elastic tunneling events, without requiring electron-electron interactions. Here we investigate the inverse process, the annihilation of an electron and a hole by elastic scattering. We find that this process leads to teleportation of the (unknown) state of the annihilated electron to a second, distant electron -- if the latter was previously entangled with the annihilated hole. We propose an experiment, involving low-frequency noise measurements on a two-dimensional electron gas in a high magnetic field, to detect teleportation of electrons and holes in the two lowest Landau levels., Comment: 5 pages including 2 figures; [2017: fixed broken postscript figures]

A theory is presented for low-frequency current and voltage correlators of a mesoscopic conductor embedded in a macroscopic electromagnetic environment. This Keldysh field theory evaluated at its saddle-point provides the microscopic justification for our earlier phenomenological calculation (using the cascaded Langevin approach). The nonlinear feedback from the environment mixes correlators of different orders, which explains the unexpected temperature dependence of the third moment of tunneling noise observed in a recent experiment. At non-zero temperature, current and voltage correlators of order three and higher are no longer linearly related. We show that a Hall bar measures voltage correlators in the longitudinal voltage and current correlators in the Hall voltage. We go beyond the saddle-point approximation to consider the environmental Coulomb blockade. We derive that the leading order Coulomb blockade correction to the n-th cumulant of current fluctuations is proportional to the voltage derivative of the (n+1)-th cumulant, generalizing to any n the earlier results for n=1,2., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures

We demonstrate theoretically that the shot noise produced by a tunnel barrier in a two-channel conductor violates a Bell inequality. The non-locality is shown to originate from entangled electron-hole pairs created by tunneling events -- without requiring electron-electron interactions. The degree of entanglement (concurrence) equals 2(T_1 T_2)^1/2 (T_1+T_2)^-1, with T_1,T_2 << 1 the transmission eigenvalues. A pair of edge channels in the quantum Hall effect is proposed as experimental realization., Comment: 4 pages including 1 figure; three comments have been added to the reference list, addressing the entanglement of formation, the Clauser-Horne inequality, and the dephasing effect of a finite voltage

We investigate the effect of weak interactions on the full counting statistics of charge transfer through an arbitrary mesoscopic conductor. We show that the main effect can be incorporated into an energy dependence of the transmission eigenvalues and study this dependence in a non-perturbative approach. An unexpected result is that all mesoscopic conductors behave at low energies like either a single or a double tunnel junction, which divides them into two broad classes., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

Poisson statistics predicts that the shot noise in a tunnel junction has a temperature independent third cumulant e^2\I, determined solely by the mean current I. Experimental data, however, show a puzzling temperature dependence. We demonstrate theoretically that the third cumulant becomes strongly temperature dependent and may even change sign as a result of feedback from the electromagnetic environment. In the limit of a noninvasive (zero-impedance) measurement circuit in thermal equilibrium with the junction, we find that the third cumulant crosses over from e^2/I at low temperatures to -e^2/I at high temperatures., Comment: 4 pages including 2 figures

We calculate the fluctuating voltage V(t) over a conductor driven out of equilibrium by a current source. This is the dual of the shot noise problem of current fluctuations I(t) in a voltage-biased circuit. In the single-channel case the distribution of the accumulated phase Phi=(e/hbar)\int Vdt is the Pascal (or binomial waiting-time) distribution -- distinct from the binomial distribution of transferred charge Q=\int Idt. The weak-coupling limit of a Poissonian P(Phi) is reached in the limit of a ballistic conductor, while in the tunneling limit P(Phi) has the chi-square form., Comment: 4 pages including 2 figures

A quantum mechanical theory is developed for the statistics of momentum transferred to the lattice by conduction electrons. Results for the electromechanical noise power in the semiclassical diffusive transport regime agree with a recent theory based on the Boltzmann-Langevin equation. All moments of the transferred momentum are calculated for a single-channel conductor with a localized scatterer, and compared with the known statistics of transmitted charge., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures

Ballistic electrons flowing through a constriction can transfer momentum to the lattice and excite a vibration of a free-standing conductor. We show (both numerically and analytically) that the electromechanical noise power P does not vanish on the plateaus of quantized conductance -- in contrast to the current noise. The dependence of $P$ on the constriction width can be oscillatory or stepwise, depending on the geometry. The stepwise increase amounts to an approximate quantization of momentum noise., Comment: 4 pages including 4 figures

We present here a quantum mechanical framework for defining the statistics of measurements of time integrals of A(t), A(t) being a quantum mechanical variable. This is a generalization of the so-called full counting statistics proposed earlier for DC electric currents. We develop an influence functional formalism that allows us to study the quantum system along with the measuring device thus fully accounting for the action of the detector on the system to be measured. We define the full counting statistics of an arbitrary variable by means of an evolution operator that relates initial and final density matrices of the measuring device. In this way we are able to resolve inconsistencies that occur in earlier definitions. We suggest two schemes whereby the so defined full statistics can be observed experimentally., Comment: 11 pages

Highly degenerate chaotic radiation has a Gaussian density matrix and a large occupation number of modes $f $. If it is passed through a weakly transmitting barrier, its counting statistics is close to Poissonian. We show that a second identical barrier, in series with the first, drastically modifies the statistics. The variance of the photocount is increased above the mean by a factor $f$ times a numerical coefficient. The photocount distribution reaches a limiting form with a Gaussian body and highly asymmetric tails. These are general consequences of the combination of weak transmission and multiple scattering., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures