Low-field magnetotransport in graphene cavity devices

Confinement and edge structures are known to play significant roles in electronic and transport properties of two-dimensional materials. Here, we report on low-temperature magnetotransport measurements of lithographically patterned graphene cavity nanodevices. It is found that the evolution of the low-field magnetoconductance characteristics with varying carrier density exhibits different behaviors in graphene cavity and bulk graphene devices. In the graphene cavity devices, we have observed that intravalley scattering becomes dominant as the Fermi level gets close to the Dirac point. We associate this enhanced intravalley scattering to the effect of charge inhomogeneities and edge disorder in the confined graphene nanostructures. We have also observed that the dephasing rate of carriers in the cavity devices follows a parabolic temperature dependence, indicating that the direct Coulomb interaction scattering mechanism governs the dephasing at low temperatures. Our results demonstrate the importance of confinement in carrier transport in graphene nanostructure devices.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Schottky barrier and contact resistance of InSb nanowire field effect transistors

Understanding of the electrical contact properties of semiconductor nanowire (NW) field effect transistors (FETs) plays a crucial role in employing semiconducting NWs as building blocks for future nanoelectronic devices and in the study of fundamental physics problems. Here, we report on a study of the contact properties of Ti/Au, a widely used contact metal combination, to individual InSb NWs via both two-probe and four-probe transport measurements. We show that a Schottky barrier of height $\Phi_{\rm{SB}}\sim20\ \rm{meV}$ is present at the metal-InSb NW interfaces and its effective height is gate tunable. The contact resistance ($R_{\rm{c}}$) in the InSb NWFETs is also analyzed by magnetotransport measurements at low temperatures. It is found that $R_{\rm{c}}$ at on-state exhibits a pronounced magnetic field dependent feature, namely it is increased strongly with increasing magnetic field after an onset field $B_{\rm{c}}$. A qualitative picture that takes into account magnetic depopulation of subbands in the NWs is provided to explain the observation. Our results provide a solid experimental evidence for the presence of a Schottky barrier at Ti/Au-InSb NW interfaces and can be used as a basis for design and fabrication of novel InSb NW based nanoelectronic devices and quantum devices.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

A Bjorken sum rule for semileptonic Ωb\Omega_b decays to ground and excited charmed baryon states

We derive a Bjorken sum rule for semileptonic $\Omega_b$ decays to ground and low-lying negative-parity excited charmed baryon states, in the heavy quark limit. We discuss the restriction from this sum rule on form factors and compare it with some models.Comment: 10 pages, RevTex, no figure, Alberta Thy--26--9

Study of 0-π\pi phase transition in hybrid superconductor-InSb nanowire quantum dot devices

Hybrid superconductor-semiconducting nanowire devices provide an ideal platform to investigating novel intragap bound states, such as the Andreev bound states (ABSs), Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states, and the Majorana bound states. The competition between Kondo correlations and superconductivity in Josephson quantum dot (QD) devices results in two different ground states and the occurrence of a 0-$\pi$ quantum phase transition. Here we report on transport measurements on hybrid superconductor-InSb nanowire QD devices with different device geometries. We demonstrate a realization of continuous gate-tunable ABSs with both 0-type levels and $\pi$-type levels. This allow us to manipulate the transition between 0 and $\pi$ junction and explore charge transport and spectrum in the vicinity of the quantum phase transition regime. Furthermore, we find a coexistence of 0-type ABS and $\pi$-type ABS in the same charge state. By measuring temperature and magnetic field evolution of the ABSs, the different natures of the two sets of ABSs are verified, being consistent with the scenario of phase transition between the singlet and doublet ground state. Our study provides insights into Andreev transport properties of hybrid superconductor-QD devices and sheds light on the crossover behavior of the subgap spectrum in the vicinity of 0-$\pi$ transition

Charge transport and electron-hole asymmetry in low-mobility graphene/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructures

Graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (G/$h$-BN) heterostructures offer an excellent platform for developing nanoelectronic devices and for exploring correlated states in graphene under modulation by a periodic superlattice potential. Here, we report on transport measurements of nearly $0^{\circ}$-twisted G/$h$-BN heterostructures. The heterostructures investigated are prepared by dry transfer and thermally annealing processes and are in the low mobility regime (approximately $3000~\mathrm{cm}^{2}\mathrm{V}^{-1}\mathrm{s}^{-1}$ at 1.9 K). The replica Dirac spectra and Hofstadter butterfly spectra are observed on the hole transport side, but not on the electron transport side, of the heterostructures. We associate the observed electron-hole asymmetry to the presences of a large difference between the opened gaps in the conduction and valence bands and a strong enhancement in the interband contribution to the conductivity on the electron transport side in the low-mobility G/$h$-BN heterostructures. We also show that the gaps opened at the central Dirac point and the hole-branch secondary Dirac point are large, suggesting the presence of strong graphene-substrate interaction and electron-electron interaction in our G/$h$-BN heterostructures. Our results provide additional helpful insight into the transport mechanism in G/$h$-BN heterostructures.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Plaquette order and deconfined quantum critical point in the spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model on the honeycomb lattice

We have precisely determined the ground state phase diagram of the quantum spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic Heisenberg model on the honeycomb lattice using the tensor renormalization group method. We find that the ferromagnetic, ferroquadrupolar, and a large part of the antiferromagnetic phases are stable against quantum fluctuations. However, around the phase where the ground state is antiferroquadrupolar ordered in the classical limit, quantum fluctuations suppress completely all magnetic orders, leading to a plaquette order phase which breaks the lattice symmetry but preserves the spin SU(2) symmetry. On the evidence of our numerical results, the quantum phase transition between the antiferromagnetic phase and the plaquette phase is found to be either a direct second order or a very weak first order transition.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, published versio