A new twist on graphene: an interview with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan MacDonald

Graphene is the building block of graphite, made of carbon atoms bonded into sheets of hexagonal rings just a single atom thick. Although such isolated sheets had been predicted for many decades to exist, and had been grown on other surfaces, interest in this material exploded after the discovery in 2004 that single sheets could be made easily and cheaply by separating them mechanically from graphite flakes (a process called exfoliation). Although graphene is often advertised as a ‘wonder material’—electronically conducting, transparent and extremely strong and flexible—much of the interest in it is more fundamental. As a 2D conductor, graphene shows unusual electronic and magnetic properties that enable the study of quantum-mechanical effects of confinement and of correlations between electron motions—some of which might find applications in electronic devices. The excitement of this discovery was reflected in the award of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics to two pioneers in the field: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the UK. This rich behavior is broadened still further when two graphene sheets are brought close enough to interact with one another. In particular, the electronic properties may then depend on the relative orientation of the sheets: how aligned the two ‘honeycomb’ lattices are. Two grids superimposed on one another may create ‘superlattices’: regularities at larger scales than the grid spacing, due to registry (commensurability) between the two at certain angles. This so-called moiré effect is sometimes evident for two closely spaced grid-like fences seen from afar. Experimentally exploring the electronic properties of such ‘twisted bilayer graphene’ requires an ability to precisely control the position and orientation of the two sheets. These phenomena are now recognized as generic to other 2D materials, such as hexagonal sheets of boron nitride. They have revealed a fertile playground for condensed-matter physics. In particular, striking electronic properties appear at certain ‘magic-angle’ twists of the layers. NSR spoke to two of the leading experts in the study of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG): experimentalist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and theorist Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin.