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The marvels of moiré materials

Moiré systems formed by 2D atomic layers have widely tunable electrical and optical properties and host exotic, strongly correlated and topological phenomena, including superconductivity, correlated insulator states and orbital magnetism. In this Viewpoint, researchers studying different aspects of moiré materials discuss the most exciting directions in this rapidly expanding field.

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Acknowledgements

E.T. acknowledges support from the Welch Foundation grant F-2018-20190330, the National Science Foundation grant DMR-1720595 and the Army Research Office grant W911NF-17-1-0312. E.Y.A. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy (DOE; DOE-FG02-99ER45742) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF9453). A.H.M. acknowledges support from DOE grant DE-FG02-02ER45958. P.J-H. acknowledges support by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) Initiative through grant GBMF9643 and the Fundación Ramón Areces. A.F.Y. acknowledges the support of the US Office of Naval Research under award N00014-20-1-2609. A.Y. acknowledges funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of the EPiQS initiative GBMF 9469, DOE-BES grant, DOE-FG02-07ER46419, NSF-DMR-2011750 and NSF-DMR-1904442 grant. K.F.M. acknowledges the support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0219. T.S. was supported by NSF grant DMR-1911666 and partially through a Simons Investigator Award from the Simons Foundation. D.K.E. acknowledges support from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain through the Severo Ochoa programme for centres of excellence in research and development (SE5-0522), Fundació Privada Cellex, Fundació Privada Mir-Puig, the Generalitat de Catalunya through the CERCA program and the La Caixa Foundation.

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Eva Y. Andrei is Board of Governors Chaired Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. She studies the effects of moiré structures on the electronic properties of stacked 2D crystals by using transport and scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy. Her group discovered that the twist angle between two superposed graphene crystals controls their electronic properties. She is currently exploring new pathways for engineering flat bands in 2D materials, for example, using buckling transformations and substrate patterning.

Dmitri K. Efetov joined Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques in Barcelona as a Professor and Group Leader in 2017. His group investigates moiré materials with electronic transport and optoelectronic techniques, and is credited for the development of the highest-quality magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene devices demonstrated so far.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is currently Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the recipient of the American Physical Society 2020 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize and the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics for the discovery of correlations and superconductivity in magic-angle graphene. His research interests lie in the area of experimental condensed matter physics, in particular, quantum electronic transport and optoelectronics in novel 2D materials, with special emphasis on investigating their superconducting, magnetic and topological properties.

Allan H. Macdonald is the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. As a theorist, his primary research interests centre on the influence of electron–electron interactions on the electronic properties of metals and semiconductors, and, in particular, on the understanding of moiré superlattice systems.

Kin Fai Mak is an Associate Professor of Physics and of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. His research group uses optical and electrical probes to explore condensed matter phenomena in atomically thin materials and their heterostructures.

T. Senthil is a Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a theorist interested in correlated materials, their novel phases and the associated phase transitions.

Emanuel Tutuc is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are the electronic properties of low-dimensional systems and the realization of novel devices. His group introduced the experimental techniques used to realize rotationally controlled van der Waals heterostructures, including controlled moiré patterns.

Ali Yazdani is the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics and the Director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials. He specializes in the development and the application of high-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy to quantum materials. His group has uncovered a wide range of novel correlated and topological phenomena, including in moiré systems.

Andrea F. Young is Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His group combines nanofabrication and electronic measurement techniques to investigate the properties of electronic states in quantum materials, including moiré materials.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Eva Y. Andrei, Dmitri K. Efetov, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Allan H. MacDonald, Kin Fai Mak, T. Senthil, Emanuel Tutuc, Ali Yazdani or Andrea F. Young.

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Andrei, E.Y., Efetov, D.K., Jarillo-Herrero, P. et al. The marvels of moiré materials. Nat Rev Mater 6, 201–206 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00284-1

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