Probing the tunable multi-cone bandstructure in Bernal bilayer graphene

Anna M. Seiler, Nils Jacobsen, Martin Statz, Noelia Fernandez, Francesca Falorsi, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Zhiyu Dong, Leonid S. Levitov, R. Thomas Weitz

Published 2023-11-17Version 1

Controlling the bandstructure of Dirac materials is of wide interest in current research but has remained an outstanding challenge for systems such as monolayer graphene. In contrast, Bernal bilayer graphene (BLG) offers a highly flexible platform for tuning the bandstructure, featuring two distinct regimes. In one regime, which is well established and widely used, a tunable bandgap is induced by a large enough transverse displacement field. Another is a gapless metallic band occurring near charge neutrality and at not too strong fields, featuring rich 'fine structure' consisting of four linearly-dispersing Dirac cones with opposite chiralities in each valley and van Hove singularities. Even though BLG was extensively studied experimentally in the last two decades, the evidence of this exotic bandstructure is still elusive, likely due to insufficient energy resolution. Here, rather than probing the bandstructure by direct spectroscopy, we use Landau levels as markers of the energy dispersion and carefully analyze the Landau level spectrum in a regime where the cyclotron orbits of electrons or holes in momentum space are small enough to resolve the distinct mini Dirac cones. We identify the presence of four distinct Dirac cones and map out complex topological transitions induced by electric displacement field. These findings introduce a valuable addition to the toolkit for graphene electronics.