2024 Theses Doctoral

Correlated Phases beyond Commensurate Fillings in Twisted Transition Metal Dichalcogenides

Song, Yuan

Ever since the discovery of van der Waals materials, the condensed matter community has developed a wide spectrum of techniques to probe various phases in these fascinating materials.

Among these phases, correlated phenomena are of great importance to physicists, and recent progress on moiré heterostructures offers a highly flexible and tunable platform to study them. It has been established in previous works that twisted WSe₂, a type of semiconductor in the van der Waals family, has great potential in hosting a large number of correlated phases and phase transitions.

However, it is believed that commensurability plays a critical role in the stability of correlations. In this thesis, we demonstrate correlated physics in twisted WSe₂ beyond commensurate fillings, as well as their magnetic field dependence, via electric transport measurements. At modest magnetic fields, a Stoner-like instability in the system near van Hove singularities causes a reconstruction of the Fermi surface.

On the other hand, at extremely high magnetic fields, the system exhibits reentrant insulating behaviors that are possibly due to the presence of strong excitonic interactions. Furthermore, correlated topological states are observed away from half-filling in the imbalanced excitonic metallic regime. This wide range of tunability once again proves moiré heterostructures as a promising platform to simulate quantum correlation effects on a lattice.