Andrea Young
UCSB
Moire flat bands host a wide range of correlated states at low temperatures. My talk will focus on the role of orbital magnetism in these systems, in which the electron system spontaneously polarizes into one or more spin- and valley-isospin flavors. In the first part of the talk, I will focus on the observation of quantized anomalous Hall effects in a variety of moire systems. In this spectacular manifestation of orbital magnetism, the ground state at certain integer filling factors is spontaneously polarized into a single valley-projected moire miniband, leading to robust magnetic hysteresis and a quantized Hall effect at zero magnetic field. We observe a variety of novel phenomena in this regime, including ultra-low power current induced switching and gate-tuned reversal of magnetic order that can be tied to the magnetization of the topological edge states. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the more general role orbital magnetism plays in the phase diagram of these materials at high temperatures. In particular, we find that even when the ground state is isospin unpolarized, a finite polarization can obtain at high temperatures. We ascribe this effect–observed generically in twisted bilayer graphene–to an isospin analogue of the Pomeranchuk effect of 3He, in which the high entropy associated with isospin excitations of the orbital magnets favors fluctuating magnetic order at high temperatures.
References:
Serlin et al., arXiv:1907.00261
Polshyn et al., arXiv:2004.11353
Tschirhart et al., arXiv:2006.08053
Saito et al., arXiv:2008.10830