SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2510.26958

Thermoelectricity of moir\'e heavy fermions in MoTe2/WSe2 bilayers

Abstract

Tunable Kondo lattice and heavy fermion physics have been recently reported in moir\'e materials, but most of the studies have focused on the electrical and magnetic properties. Quantitative thermoelectric measurements, which can reveal entropic information of the heavy fermions, have yet to be achieved. Here, we report a comprehensive thermoelectric study on the moir\'e heavy fermion phase realized in hole-doped angle-aligned MoTe2/WSe2 bilayers. By electrically gating the material to the Kondo lattice region of the phase diagram, we observe a sign change in the Seebeck coefficient near the Kondo coherence temperature, where the heavy fermion phase with an electron-like Fermi surface evolves into an itinerant Fermi liquid with a hole-like Fermi surface. We compare the results with the semiclassical Mott relation and discuss the observed discrepancies. In addition to the thermal dissociation of Kondo singlets in the heavy Fermi liquid, a sign change accompanied by a strong peak in the Seebeck coefficient is also observed near a Zeeman breakdown of the Kondo singlets, signaling an entropy accumulation. Our results provide entropic information on both the formation and breakdown of heavy fermions in moir\'e semiconductors.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yichi Zhang, Wenjin Zhao, Zhongdong Han, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Jie Shan, Kin Fai Mak. 2025-10-30. Thermoelectricity of moir\'e heavy fermions in MoTe2/WSe2 bilayers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26958

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Competing Interlayer Loop Currents and Superconductivity in the Bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ Model

The recent discovery of high-$T_c$ superconductivity in pressurized and thin-film bilayer nickelates, featuring a strong interlayer exchange coupling, and their potential similarities with cuprate superconductors, has made this a very active topic in condensed matter physics. In the present paper we study the strongly correlated one-orbital ($d_{x^2-y^2}$) bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ model for nickelates, where $V$ denotes the Coulomb interactions, using a controlled large-$N$ expansion at and beyond the mean-field level. Focusing on the out-of-plane spin exchange interaction ($J_\perp$), we find that it triggers both out-of-plane $s$-wave superconductivity and an out-of-plane bond-order phase ($z$-BOP) instability. The $z$-BOP gives rise to a complex $z$-axis hopping dominated by its imaginary component, which drives out-of-plane currents and induces in-plane ones, spontaneously forming on the vertical plaquettes a loop-current state that breaks time-reversal symmetry. Competition between this loop-current phase and superconductivity yields a dome-shaped superconducting region, with optimal superconductivity occurring near the $z$-BOP quantum critical point. The resulting phase diagram features a pure loop-current region, a low-doping coexistence phase, a pure superconducting state at higher doping, and a correlated metallic state.

cond-mat.str-el

Optically induced metallic state with persistent monoclinic symmetry in NdNiO$_3$

Understanding whether electronic and structural order remain coupled under nonequilibrium conditions is a central challenge in correlated materials. Here, we simultaneously track metallicity and symmetry across the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition in NdNiO$_3$ using time-resolved optical reflectivity and symmetry-sensitive second-harmonic generation. We find that metallic reflectivity emerges at significantly lower excitation fluence than restoration of the orthorhombic high-temperature symmetry. As a result, optical excitation stabilizes a metastable state that combines the reflectivity of the metallic phase with the monoclinic symmetry of the insulating phase, revealing an optically induced monoclinic metal. Only at substantially higher fluences does the symmetry fully recover to that of the high-temperature phase. These results demonstrate a nonequilibrium decoupling of metallicity and structural symmetry and establish simultaneous multiprobe spectroscopy as a powerful approach for identifying emergent phases in correlated materials.

cond-mat.str-el

Instabilities in self-consistent diagrammatic approaches and how to cure them

While self-consistent diagrammatic approaches are widely used to compute the physical properties of correlated quantum materials, their applicability may get severely hindered precisely in the parameter regions, where the most exciting physics is observed. One of the major issues, referred to as "misleading convergence", is the tendency of iterative schemes to converge to unphysical fixed points for intermediate-to-strong electronic interactions, regardless of numerical accuracy of the computation. Here, we explicitly verify that the origin of this problem in several established self-consistent many-electron approaches, defined in the general diagrammatic framework of the boson-exchange formalism, resides exclusively in the stability condition of the respective iteration schemes, and not in an intrinsic breakdown of their self-consistent diagrammatic description. This insight enables a simple and general remedy, as recently proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 016502 (2026): The redefinition of the iterative procedure, by inverting the unstable eigendirections of the Jacobian associated to the fixed point of the self-consistent algorithm. We illustrate the successful outcome of this procedure by means of systematic calculations performed on testbed, exactly solvable, models. Our results demonstrate that the physical fixed point of the diagrammatic schemes we considered can be stabilized, de facto, across the entire parameter range, including the most challenging nonperturbative/strong-coupling regimes.

cond-mat.str-el