Thermodynamic and tunneling measurements of van der Waals heterostructures

In certain electronic systems, strong Coulomb interactions between electrons can favor novel electronic phases that are difficult to anticipate theoretically. Accessing fundamental quantities such as the density of states in these platforms is crucial to their analysis. In this thesis, I explore the application of two measurement techniques towards this goal: capacitance measurements that probe the thermodynamic ground state of an electronic system and planar tunneling measurements that access its quasiparticle excitation spectrum. Both techniques were applied to van der Waals materials, a class of crystals composed of layered atomic sheets with weak interplane bonding which permits the isolation of single and few-layer sheets that can be manually assembled into heterostructures. Capacitance measurements were performed on a material system commonly known as magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG).

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Tomarken, Spencer Louis.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Raymond C. Ashoori.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123567

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123567