Misorientation-Controlled Cross-Plane Thermoelectricity in Twisted Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

The introduction of “twist” or relative rotation between two atomically thin van der Waals membranes gives rise to periodic moiré potential, leading to a substantial alteration of the band structure of the planar assembly. While most of the recent experiments primarily focus on the electronic-band hybridization by probing in-plane transport properties, here we report out-of-plane thermoelectric measurements across the van der Waals gap in twisted bilayer graphene, which exhibits an interplay of twist-dependent interlayer electronic and phononic hybridization. We show that at large twist angles, the thermopower is entirely driven by a novel phonon-drag effect at subnanometer scale, while the electronic component of the thermopower is recovered only when the misorientation between the layers is reduced to < 6° . Our experiment shows that cross-plane thermoelectricity at low angles is exceptionally sensitive to the nature of band dispersion and may provide fundamental insights into the coherence of electronic states in twisted bilayer graphene.

Publication
Physical Review Letters 125, 226802 (2020).
Date
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