arXiv subjects

Jianming Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Jianming Lu.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

In-situ operation of amorphous circuits under heavy-ion irradiation

Radiation-hardened electronics using semiconductors beyond silicon are essential for computation and control in extreme environments. Yet complex digital circuits based on such material platforms operating in situ under heavy-ion irradiation remain largely unexplored. Here, we show a timing circuit based on amorphous thin-film semiconductors at the 100-transistor scale, and demonstrate its robust operation through a functional "Hello World" ASCII output sequence. Beyond static device characterization, we evaluate the circuit under powered heavy-ion irradiation using tantalum ions, providing an operationally relevant assessment of radiation tolerance at the system level. Under a high particle flux of 2.5 x 10^3 ions cm^-2 s^-1, the circuit maintains stable operation during the irradiation test, achieving a total fluence of 1 x 10^6 ions cm^-2, establishing a milestone of prolonged powered digital operation under extreme conditions. Our work expands the design space of radiation-tolerant electronics, highlighting amorphous semiconductors as a promising foundation for digital circuits deployed in harsh environments.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

An AI-driven robotic system for two-dimensional hetero-assemblies

Nanomaterials stacked on-demand, such as rotationally assembled two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) layered compounds, provides a versatile platform for quantum simulation and the exploration of exotic electronic phases. Currently, however, such nanoassemblies remain largely confined to inefficiency, manually operated process, limiting their potential for probing emergent physical phenomena. There is a pressing need in the field for high-precision, automated assembling techniques, especially for the scalable fabrication of 2D twistronic heterostructures. Here, we present an intelligent automation system dedicated to the fabrication of van der Waals stacks, following the state-of-the-art protocol for dry transfer of exfoliated 2D materials. The system further employs metadata generated from each automated stacking procedure to perform reinforcement learning, thereby continuously bettering its performances. As a concrete demonstration, we fabricate twisted bilayer graphene (TBLG) -- known for its challenging preparation -- and exhibit its unconventional superconductivity near the magic angle. Our work may pave the way for high-throughput fabrication of low-dimensional nanomaterials including twistronic heterostructures, where integrating data mining and artificial intelligence can accelerate the discovery of novel physical phenomena.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

Electrical switching of Chern insulators in moire rhombohedral heptalayer graphene

In orbital Chern insulators, the chemical potential acts as a tuning knob to reverse chirality in dissipationless edge currents, enabling electric-field control of magnetic order-key for future quantum electronics. Despite the rise of orbital Chern insulators, electrically switchable quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) remains rare, necessitating further investigation. Here, we demonstrate electric-field-induced reversal of orbital Chern insulators in a moire superlattice composed of rhombohedral heptalayer graphene (r-7LG) aligned with hexagonal boron nitride. At one electron per moire unit cell, two emerging Chern insulating phases - one pointing away from and the other toward graphene's charge neutrality point in the phase diagram of carrier density (n) versus magnetic field (B) - exhibit energetic competition modulated by both n and B. This switchable QAHE chirality in r-7LG demonstrates a layer-number dependent response: similar phenomena in moire r-6LG require much higher magnetic fields and are absent in thinner rhombohedral graphene. Our findings establish moire-engineered rhombohedral graphene as a promising platform for exploring topological quantum materials with electrically controllable chiral edge modes and magnetic order.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2024

Quantized Landau-level crossing checkerboard in large-angle twisted graphene

When charge transport occurs under conditions like topological protection or ballistic motion, the conductance of low-dimensional systems often exhibits quantized values in units of $e^{2}/h$, where $e$ and $h$ are the elementary charge and Planck's constant. Such quantization has been pivotal in quantum metrology and computing. Here, we demonstrate a novel quantized quantity: the ratio of the displacement field to the magnetic field, $D/B$, in large-twist-angle bilayer graphene. In the high magnetic field limit, Landau level crossings between the top and bottom layers manifest equal-sized checkerboard patterns throughout the $D/B$-$\nu$ space. It stems from a peculiar electric-field-driven interlayer charge transfer at one elementary charge per flux quantum, leading to quantized intervals of critical displacement fields, (i.e., $\delta D$ = $\frac{e}{2\pi l_{B}^{2}}$, where $l_B$ is the magnetic length). Our findings suggest that interlayer charge transfer in the quantum Hall regime can yield intriguing physical phenomena, which has been overlooked in the past.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2024

Unambiguous identification of the indirect band nature of atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride

Atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), especially monolayer, has garnered increasing attention due to its intriguing optical and light-matter-interaction properties. However, its intrinsic optical properties and electronic band structure, have long remained elusive. In this study, near-resonance excited deep-UV photoluminescence/Raman spectroscopy and deep-UV reflectance contrast spectroscopy are utilized to experimentally investigate the optical properties of atomically thin h-BN across various layer numbers. It is revealed that the absence of luminescence in 1-3 layers h-BN is indicative of their indirect band gap nature, rectifying previously adopted identification of a direct band gap in monolayer BN. Notably, band-edge luminescence signals and indirect bandgap absorption start to appear in 4-layer, and the luminescence intensity increases with the number of layers, suggesting that interlayer interactions and periodicity along the z-axis enhance phonon-assisted indirect bandgap transition, even in the 4-layer case, and furthermore indicating the formation process of flat bands at the K and M valleys as the periodicity along the z direction increases. Additionally, the prominent resonance Raman signals in atomically thin h-BN underscore strong electron-phonon coupling in this material.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling the origin of unconventional moire ferroelectricity

Interfacial ferroelectricity emerges in heterostructures consisting of nonpolar van der Waals (vdW) layers, greatly expanding the scope of two dimensional ferroelectrics. In particular, the unconventional moire ferroelectricity observed in bilayer graphene/boron nitride (BN) heterostructures, exhibits promising functionalities with topological current, superconductivity and synaptic responses. However, the debate about its mechanism - correlation driven charge transfer between two graphene layers - limits device reproducibility and hence large-scale production. Here by designing a single-layer graphene encapsulated by lattice-mismatched WSe2, we identify the ferroelectricity as stemming from - instead of graphene moire bands - the particular BN, where interfacial sliding ferroelectricity must play a role. With similar structures, multilayer twisted MoS2 is found to reproduce the ferroelectricity. The key is a conductive moire ferroelectric, where the screened gate and the pinned domain wall together result in unchanged electronic states, i.e. anomalous screening. The intimate connection to interfacial sliding ferroelectricity thus provides advantages of diverse choices of constituent materials and robust polarization switching while preserving the unique anomalous screening, paving the way to reproducible and reliable memory-based devices in artificial intelligence.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Vector spectrometer with Hertz-level resolution and super-recognition capability

High-resolution optical spectrometers are crucial in revealing intricate characteristics of signals, determining laser frequencies, measuring physical constants, identifying substances, and advancing biosensing applications. Conventional spectrometers, however, often grapple with inherent trade-offs among spectral resolution, wavelength range, and accuracy. Furthermore, even at high resolution, resolving overlapping spectral lines during spectroscopic analyses remains a huge challenge. Here, we propose a vector spectrometer with ultrahigh resolution, combining broadband optical frequency hopping, ultrafine microwave-photonic scanning, and vector detection. A programmable frequency-hopping laser was developed, facilitating a sub-Hz linewidth and Hz-level frequency stability, an improvement of four and six orders of magnitude, respectively, compared to those of state-of-the-art tunable lasers. We also designed an asymmetric optical transmitter and receiver to eliminate measurement errors arising from modulation nonlinearity and multi-channel crosstalk. The resultant vector spectrometer exhibits an unprecedented frequency resolution of 2 Hz, surpassing the state-of-the-art by four orders of magnitude, over a 33-nm range. Through high-resolution vector analysis, we observed that group delay information enhances the separation capability of overlapping spectral lines by over 47%, significantly streamlining the real-time identification of diverse substances. Our technique fills the gap in optical spectrometers with resolutions below 10 kHz and enables vector measurement to embrace revolution in functionality.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

Probing the fractional quantum Hall phases in valley-layer locked bilayer MoS$_{2}$

Semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) exhibit high mobility, strong spin-orbit coupling, and large effective masses, which simultaneously leads to a rich wealth of Landau quantizations and inherently strong electronic interactions. However, in spite of their extensively explored Landau levels (LL) structure, probing electron correlations in the fractionally filled LL regime has not been possible due to the difficulty of reaching the quantum limit. Here, we report evidence for fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states at filling fractions 4/5 and 2/5 in the lowest LL of bilayer MoS$_{2}$, manifested in fractionally quantized transverse conductance plateaus accompanied by longitudinal resistance minima. We further show that the observed FQH states sensitively depend on the dielectric and gate screening of the Coulomb interactions. Our findings establish a new FQH experimental platform which are a scarce resource: an intrinsic semiconducting high mobility electron gas, whose electronic interactions in the FQH regime are in principle tunable by Coulomb-screening engineering, and as such, could be the missing link between atomically thin graphene and semiconducting quantum wells.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Reduced Hall carrier density in the overdoped strange metal regime of cuprate superconductors

Efforts to understand the microscopic origin of superconductivity in the cuprates are dependent on knowledge of the normal state. The Hall number in the low temperature, high field limit $n_{\rm H}(0)$ has a particular significance because within conventional transport theory it is simply related to the number of charge carriers, and so its evolution with doping gives crucial information about the nature of the charge transport. Here we report a study of the high field Hall coefficient of the single-layer cuprates Tl$_2$Ba$_2$CuO$_{6+δ}$ (Tl2201) and (Pb/La) doped Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CuO$_{6+δ}$ (Bi2201) which shows how $n_{\rm H}(0)$ evolves in the overdoped, so-called strange metal, regime of cuprates. We find that $n_{\rm H}(0)$ increases smoothly from $p$ to $1+p$, where $p$ is the number of holes doped into the parent insulating state, over a wide range of doping. The evolution of $n_{\rm H}$ correlates with the emergence of the anomalous linear-in-$T$ term in the low-$T$ in-plane resistivity. The results could suggest that quasiparticle decoherence extends to dopings well beyond the pseudogap regime.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Odd-even layer-number effect and layer-dependent magnetic phase diagrams in MnBi2Te4

The intrinsic magnetic layered topological insulator MnBi2Te4 with nontrivial topological properties and magnetic order has become a promising system for exploring exotic quantum phenomena such as quantum anomalous Hall effect. However, the layer-dependent magnetism of MnBi2Te4, which is fundamental and crucial for further exploration of quantum phenomena in this system, remains elusive. Here, we use polar reflective magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy, combined with theoretical calculations, to obtain an in-depth understanding of the layer-dependent magnetic properties in MnBi2Te4. The magnetic behavior of MnBi2Te4 exhibits evident odd-even layer-number effect, i.e. the oscillations of the coercivity of the hysteresis loop (at μ0Hc) and the spin-flop transition (at μ0H1), concerning the Zeeman energy and magnetic anisotropy energy. In the even-number septuple layers, an anomalous magnetic hysteresis loop is observed, which is attributed to the thickness-independent surface-related magnetization. Through the linear-chain model, we can clarify the odd-even effect of the spin-flop field and determine the evolution of magnetic states under the external magnetic field. The mean-field method also allows us to trace the experimentally observed magnetic phase diagrams to the magnetic fields, layer numbers and especially, temperature. Overall, by harnessing the unusual layer-dependent magnetic properties, our work paves the way for further study of quantum properties of MnBi2Te4.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

Kondo behavior and metamagnetic phase transition in a heavy fermion compound CeBi2

Heavy fermions represent an archetypal example of strongly correlated electron systems which, due to entanglement among different interactions, often exhibit exotic and fascinating physics involving Kondo screening, magnetism and unconventional superconductivity. Here we report a comprehensive study on the transport and thermodynamic properties of a cerium-based heavy fermion compound CeBi$_2$ which undergoes an anti-ferromagnetic transition at $T_N$ $\sim$ 3.3 K. Its high temperature paramagnetic state is characterized by an enhanced heat capacity with Sommerfeld coefficient $γ$ over 200 mJ/molK$^2$. The magnetization in the magnetically ordered state features a metamagnetic transition. Remarkably, a large negative magnetoresistance associated with the magnetism was observed in a wide temperature and field-angle range. Collectively, CeBi$_2$ may serve as an intriguing system to study the interplay between $f$ electrons and the itinerant Fermi sea.

cond-mat.str-el↗