Graphene/h-BN heterostructures under pressure: From van der Waals to covalent

Citation:

Barboza APM, Souza ACR, Matos MJS, Brant JC, Barbosa TC, Chacham H, Mazzoni MSC, Neves BRA. Graphene/h-BN heterostructures under pressure: From van der Waals to covalent. Carbon [Internet]. 2019;155 :108 - 113.

Abstract:

Scanning probe microscopy and ab initio calculations reveal modifications on the electronic and structural properties of graphene/h-BN heterostructures induced by compression. Using AFM and EFM techniques, with charge injection being made in the heterostructures at different pressures, the charge injection efficiency monotonically decreases with increasing pressure for monolayer-graphene (MLG)+BN heterostructures, indicative of a conductor-insulator electronic transition. Bilayer-graphene (BLG)+BN and trilayer-graphene (TLG)+BN heterostructures show a non-monotonic behavior of charge injection versus pressure, indicative of competing electronic structure modifications. First-principle calculations of these systems indicate a pressure-induced van der Waals-to-covalent interlayer transition, where such interlayer covalent binding, in the presence of water molecules, results in a disordered insulating structure for the MLG + BN case, while it leads to an ordered conducting structure for both BLG + BN and TLG + BN heterostructures. These opposing effects may have a strong influence on graphene/h-BN-based electronic devices and their physics under pressurized environments.

Website

Publicações Recentes do Departamento de Física

Omwoyo E, Belich H, Fabris JC, Velten H. Black hole lensing in Kerr-de Sitter spacetimes. The European Physical Journal Plus. 2023;138 (11) :1043.

Valentim MR, Matos MJS, Mazzoni MSC. B2N2O2: A wide-bandgap two-dimensional semiconductor featuring a zigzag nitrogen array of bonds. Applied Physics Letters [Internet]. 2023;123 (9) :093103. Publisher's Version Abstract

In this work, we apply a combination of theoretical techniques to characterize a two-dimensional material with formula B2N2O2, featuring a zigzag array of nitrogen atoms. We predict its energetic, thermal, and dynamic stability and determine its electronic properties, including band structure and mobility evaluation for a phonon-mediated mechanism. We show that the compound is a wideband-gap semiconductor, with parabolic band edges and with large electron and hole mobilities within the deformation potential approach. We ascribe this result to the existence of electronic channels defined by the zigzag array of nitrogen bonds, which define the edges of both conduction and valence bands. We also propose a mechanism to synthesize the compound based on oxygen functionalization and application of pressure. Finally, we show that the results can be generalized to represent a family of 2D compounds.

Flecha AC, Bandeira RA, Campos VBG, Silva AVC, Leiras A. Social Network Analysis in disaster management. Production. 2023;33 :e20220046.

Fabris JC, Alvarenga MH, Velten H. Using Cosmological Perturbation Theory to Distinguish between GR and Unimodular Gravity. Symmetry [Internet]. 2023;15 (7). Publisher's Version Abstract

Unimodular gravity is one of the oldest geometric gravity theories and alternatives to general relativity. Essentially, it is based on the Einstein–Hilbert Lagrangian with an additional constraint on the determinant of the metric. It can be explicitly shown that unimodular gravity can be recast as general relativity in the presence of a cosmological constant. This fact has led to many discussions on the equivalence of both theories at the classical and quantum levels. Here, we present an analysis focused on the classical scalar perturbations around a cosmological background. We focus on the unusual situation in which the typical conservation laws are not adopted. The discussion is extended to the case where a non-minimal coupled scalar field is introduced. We also present a gauge-invariant analysis showing that perturbations in unimodular gravity display instabilities. Our results reinforce that the equivalence is not verified completely at a cosmological perturbative level.

Martins LGP, Ruiz-Tijerina DA, Occhialini CA, Park J-H, Song Q, Lu A-Y, Venezuela P, Cançado LG, Mazzoni MSC, Matos MJS, et al. Pressure tuning of minibands in MoS2/WSe2 heterostructures revealed by moiré phonons. Nature Nanotechnology [Internet]. 2023. Publisher's Version Abstract

Moiré superlattices of two-dimensional heterostructures arose as a new platform to investigate emergent behaviour in quantum solids with unprecedented tunability. To glean insights into the physics of these systems, it is paramount to discover new probes of the moiré potential and moiré minibands, as well as their dependence on external tuning parameters. Hydrostatic pressure is a powerful control parameter, since it allows to continuously and reversibly enhance the moiré potential. Here we use high pressure to tune the minibands in a rotationally aligned MoS2/WSe2 moiré heterostructure, and show that their evolution can be probed via moiré phonons. The latter are Raman-inactive phonons from the individual layers that are activated by the moiré potential. Moiré phonons manifest themselves as satellite Raman peaks arising exclusively from the heterostructure region, increasing in intensity and frequency under applied pressure. Further theoretical analysis reveals that their scattering rate is directly connected to the moiré potential strength. By comparing the experimental and calculated pressure-induced enhancement, we obtain numerical estimates for the moiré potential amplitude and its pressure dependence. The present work establishes moiré phonons as a sensitive probe of the moiré potential as well as the electronic structures of moiré systems.

Ribeiro LC, Bernardes AT, Mello H. On the fractal patterns of language structures. PLOS ONE [Internet]. 2023;18 (5) :1-20. Publisher's Version Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts, i.e., content that lacks metadata and cannot easily be indexed or mapped onto standard database fields. It has several applications, from sentiment analysis and text summary to automatic language translation. In this work, we use NLP to figure out similar structural linguistic patterns among several different languages. We apply the word2vec algorithm that creates a vector representation for the words in a multidimensional space that maintains the meaning relationship between the words. From a large corpus we built this vectorial representation in a 100-dimensional space for English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. Then, we calculated the fractal dimensions of the structure that represents each language. The structures are multi-fractals with two different dimensions that we use, in addition to the token-dictionary size rate of the languages, to represent the languages in a three-dimensional space. Finally, analyzing the distance among languages in this space, we conclude that the closeness there is tendentially related to the distance in the Phylogenetic tree that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of the languages from a common ancestor.