Chern Insulator States with Tunable Chern Numbers in a Graphene Moiré Superlattice

Nano Lett. 2024 Jun 12;24(23):6838-6843. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c05145. Epub 2024 Jun 2.

Abstract

Moiré superlattices, constituted by two-dimensional materials, demonstrate a variety of strongly correlated and topological phenomena including correlated insulators, superconductivity, and integer/fractional Chern insulators. In the realm of topological nontrivial Chern insulators within specific moiré superlattices, previous studies usually observe a single Chern number at a given filling factor in a device. Here we present the observation of gate-tunable Chern numbers within the Chern insulator state of an ABC-stacked trilayer graphene/hexagonal boron nitride moiré superlattice device. Near quarter filling, the moiré superlattice exhibits spontaneous valley polarization and distinct ferromagnetism associated with the Chern insulator states over a range of the displacement field. Surprisingly we find a transition of the Chern number from C = 3 to 4 as the displacement field is increased. Our observation of gate-tunable correlated Chern insulators suggests new ways to control and manipulate topological states in a moiré superlattice device.

Keywords: Chern insulator; anomalous Hall effect; magnetism; moiré superlattice; trilayer graphene.