The Search for Novel Superconductors in Moire Flat Bands

Project Personnel

Philip Kim

Principal Investigator

Mitchell Luskin

Efthimios Kaxiras

Ke Wang

Funding Divisions

Division of Materials Research (DMR), Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS), Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA)

The moire heterostructure engineering of 2-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials leads to quantum heterostructures. Utilizing recently demonstrated twisted vdW heteroepitaxy, the investigators will construct vdW homo/hetero structures to realize correlated electronic states that appear in the moire flat bands. With inputs from theory and mathematical modeling of multiscale electronic structure, the project will experimentally investigate multilayer 2D superconducting systems with unusual properties, such as gate tunable transition temperature and non-conventional pairing symmetries. Various material platforms will be explored including twisted double bilayer graphene, twisted trilayer graphene and twisted homo- and hetetro-structures based on transition metal dichalcogenides. Theoretical guidance will be an indispensable part of this study since there are a variety of choices for material platforms and twist angle which cannot be covered by experiment alone without targeted modeling guide. Unconventional superconductivity can also lead into the development and discovery of topological superconductors, which can be utilized for quantum computing. The qubits realized in topological superconducting systems hold promise for fault-tolerant quantum computation, thanks to the topological nature of the underlying quantum states.

Research Highlights

Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF)