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Updated: Jun 16, 2026

Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Milli-Tesla quantization enabled by tuneable Coulomb screening in large-angle twisted graphene
I Babich1,2, I Reznikov3,4, I Begichev3,4
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. ian.babich@u.nus.edu.
Abstract:
The electronic quality of graphene has improved significantly over the past two decades, revealing novel phenomena. However, even state-of-the-art devices exhibit substantial spatial charge fluctuations originating from charged defects inside the encapsulating crystals, limiting their performance. Here, we overcome this issue by assembling devices in which graphene is encapsulated by other graphene layers while remaining electronically decoupled from them via a large twist angle (~10-30°). Doping of the encapsulating graphene layer introduces strong Coulomb screening, maximized by the sub-nanometer distance between the layers, and reduces the inhomogeneity in the adjacent layer to just a few carriers per square micrometre. The enhanced quality manifests in Landau quantization emerging at magnetic fields as low as ~5 milli-Tesla and enables resolution of a small energy gap at the Dirac point. Our encapsulation approach can be extended to other two-dimensional systems, enabling further exploration of the electronic properties of ultrapure devices.

