No abstract

The coupling between electrons and phonons is at the heart of many fundamental phenomena in physics. In nature, this coupling is generally predetermined for both, molecules and solids. Tremendous advances have been made in controlling electrons and phonons in engineered nanosystems, yet, control over the coupling between these degrees of freedom is still widely lacking. Here, we use a new generation of carbon nanotube devices with movable ultra-clean single and double quantum dots embedded in a mechanical resonator to demonstrate the tailoring of the interactions between electronic and mechanical degrees of freedom on the nanoscale. Exploiting this tunable coupling, we directly image the spatial structure of phonon modes and probe their parity in real space. Most interestingly, we demonstrate selective coupling between individual mechanical modes and internal electronic degrees of freedom. Our results open new vistas for engineering bulk quantum phenomena in a controlled nanoscale setting and offer important new tools for entangling the electronic and mechanical degrees of freedom at the quantum level.

Magnetism in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials has recently emerged as one of the most promising areas in condensed matter research, with many exciting emerging properties and significant potential for applications ranging from topological magnonics to low-power spintronics, quantum computing, and optical communications. In the brief time after their discovery, 2D magnets have blossomed into a rich area for investigation, where fundamental concepts in magnetism are challenged by the behavior of spins that can develop at the single layer limit. However, much effort is still needed in multiple fronts before 2D magnets can be routinely used for practical implementations. In this comprehensive review, prominent authors with expertise in complementary fields of 2D magnetism ( i.e. , synthesis, device engineering, magneto-optics, imaging, transport, mechanics, spin excitations, and theory and simulations) have joined together to provide a genome of current knowledge and a guideline for future developments in 2D magnetic materials research.

The ability to tune local parameters of quantum Hamiltonians has been demonstrated in experimental systems including ultracold atoms, trapped ions, superconducting circuits and photonic crystals. Such systems possess negligible disorder, enabling local tunability. Conversely, in condensed-matter systems, electrons are subject to disorder, which often destroys delicate correlated phases and precludes local tunability. The realization of a disorder-free and locally-tunable condensed-matter system thus remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we demonstrate a new technique for deterministic creation of locally-tunable, ultralow-disorder electron systems in carbon nanotubes suspended over complex electronic circuits. Using transport experiments we show that electrons can be localized at any position along the nanotube and that the confinement potential can be smoothly moved from location to location. The high mirror symmetry of transport characteristics about the nanotube centre establishes the negligible effects of electronic disorder, thus allowing experiments in precision-engineered one-dimensional potentials. We further demonstrate the ability to position multiple nanotubes at chosen separations, generalizing these devices to coupled one-dimensional systems. These capabilities could enable many novel experiments on electronics, mechanics and spins in one dimension.

The quantum crystal of electrons, predicted more than eighty years ago by Eugene Wigner, is still one of the most elusive states of matter. Here, we present experiments that observe the one-dimensional Wigner crystal directly, by imaging its charge density in real-space. To measure this fragile state without perturbing it, we developed a new scanning probe platform that utilizes a pristine carbon nanotube as a scanning charge perturbation to image, with minimal invasiveness, the many-body electronic density within another nanotube. The obtained images, of few electrons confined in one-dimension, match those of strongly interacting crystals, with electrons ordered like pearls on a necklace. Comparison to theoretical modeling demonstrates the dominance of Coulomb interactions over kinetic energy and the weakness of exchange interactions. Our experiments provide direct evidence for this long-sought electronic state, and open the way for studying other fragile interacting states by imaging their many-body density in real-space.