ABSTRACT
The flat bands in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) provide an especially rich arena to investigate interaction-driven ground states. While progress has been made in identifying the correlated insulators and their excitations at commensurate moiré filling factors, the spin-valley polarizations of the topological states that emerge at high magnetic field remain unknown. Here we introduce a technique based on twist-decoupled van der Waals layers that enables measurement of their electronic band structure and-by studying the backscattering between counter-propagating edge states-the determination of the relative spin polarization of their edge modes. We find that the symmetry-broken quantum Hall states that extend from the charge neutrality point in MATBG are spin unpolarized at even integer filling factors. The measurements also indicate that the correlated Chern insulator emerging from half filling of the flat valence band is spin unpolarized and suggest that its conduction band counterpart may be spin polarized.
ABSTRACT
Magnetic monopoles1-3 are hypothetical elementary particles with quantized magnetic charge. In principle, a magnetic monopole can be detected by the quantized jump in magnetic flux that it generates upon passage through a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID)4. Following the theoretical prediction that emergent magnetic monopoles should exist in several lanthanide pyrochlore magnetic insulators5,6, including Dy2Ti2O7, the SQUID technique has been proposed for their direct detection6. However, this approach has been hindered by the high number density and the generation-recombination fluctuations expected of such thermally generated monopoles. Recently, theoretical advances have enabled the prediction of the spectral density of magnetic-flux noise from monopole generation-recombination fluctuations in these materials7,8. Here we report the development of a SQUID-based flux noise spectrometer and measurements of the frequency and temperature dependence of magnetic-flux noise generated by Dy2Ti2O7 crystals. We detect almost all of the features of magnetic-flux noise predicted for magnetic monopole plasmas7,8, including the existence of intense magnetization noise and its characteristic frequency and temperature dependence. Moreover, comparisons of simulated and measured correlation functions of the magnetic-flux noise indicate that the motions of magnetic charges are strongly correlated. Intriguingly, because the generation-recombination time constant for Dy2Ti2O7 is in the millisecond range, magnetic monopole flux noise amplified by SQUID is audible to humans.
