Coexistence of Reconstructed and Unreconstructed Structures in Structural Transition Regime of Twisted Bilayer Graphene
arXiv:2209.14730 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.107.125410
Abstract
In twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), a twist-angle-dependent competition between interlayer stacking energy and intralayer elastic energy results in flat rigid layers at large twist angles and lattice reconstruction at small twist angles. Despite enormous scientific interest and effort in the TBG, however, an experimental study of evolution from the rigid lattice to the reconstructed lattice as a function of twist angle is still missing. Here we present a scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy study to reveal the twist-angle-dependent lattice reconstruction in the TBG. Our experiment demonstrates that there is a transition regime between the rigid regime and the relaxed regime and, unexpectedly, the reconstructed and unreconstructed structures coexist in the transition regime. The coexistence of the two distinct structures in this regime may arise from subtle balance between the interlayer stacking energy and intralayer elastic energy in the TBG with intermediate moiré sizes.
4 Figures in main text
References in corpus (11)
- Boron nitride substrates for high-quality graphene electronics
- The structure of suspended graphene sheets
- STM Spectroscopy of ultra-flat graphene on hexagonal boron nitride
- Single Layer Behavior and Its Breakdown in Twisted Graphene Layers
- Lattice relaxation and energy band modulation in twisted bilayer graphenes
- Strain fields in twisted bilayer graphene
- Density of states and zero Landau level probed through capacitance of graphene
- Lattice reconstruction induced multiple ultra-flat bands in twisted bilayer WSe2
- Tunable Sample-wide Electronic Kagome Lattice in Low-angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene
- Oscillations of van Hove singularities spacing induced by sub-Angstrom fluctuations of interlayer spacing in graphene superlattices
- Electronic confinement in quantum dots of twisted bilayer graphene