Public Reporting Burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Manuscript published: Nature 439, 303-306 (2006) Report Title ABSTRACT This is a report of a publication supported by the research grant:"Artificial 'spin ice' in a geometrically frustrated lattice of nanoscale ferromagnetic islands", R.

The existence of inequivalent valleys K and K′ in the momentum space of two-dimensional hexagonal lattices provides a new electronic degree of freedom, the manipulation of which can potentially lead to new types of electronics, in analogy to the role played by electron spin 1-3 . In materials with broken inversion symmetry, such as an electrically gated bilayer graphene 4,5 , the momentum-space Berry curvature  carries opposite sign in the K and K′ valleys. A sign reversal of  along an internal boundary of the sheet gives rise to counterpropagating one-dimensional conducting modes encoded with opposite valley indices. These metallic states are topologically protected against backscattering in the absence of valley-mixing scattering, and thus can carry current ballistically 1,6-11 . In bilayer graphene, the reversal of  can occur at the domain wall of AB and BA stacked domains 12-14 , or at the line junction of two oppositely gated regions 6 . The latter approach can provide a scalable platform to implement valleytronic operations such as valves and waveguides 9,15 , but is technically challenging to realize. Here we fabricate a dual-split-gate structure in bilayer graphene and demonstrate transport evidence of the predicted metallic states. They possess a mean free path of up to a few hundred nanometers in the absence of a magnet field. The application of perpendicular magnetic field suppresses backscattering significantly and enables a 400-nanometer-long junction to exhibit conductance close to the ballistic limit of 4 e 2 /h at 8 Tesla. Our experiment paves the path to the realization of gate-controlled ballistic valley transport and the development of valleytronic applications in atomically thin materials.Exploiting the valley degree of freedom in hexagonal lattices may offer an alternative pathway to achieving low-power-consumption electronics. Experiments have shown that a net valley polarization in the material can be induced by the use of circularly polarized light 2,16,17 or a net bulk current [18][19][20] . However the use of light is not always desirable in electronics and device proposals using bulk valley polarization often put stringent requirements on the size and edge orientation of the active area 3 . Alternatively, electrically created, valley-polarized topological conducting channels in high-mobility bilayer graphene may offer a robust, scalable platform to realize valleytronic operations 1,6,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] . Figure 1a illustrates the dual-split-gating scheme proposed by Martin et al 6 , where an AB-stacked bilayer graphene (BLG) sheet is controlled by two pairs of top and bottom gates separated by a line junction. The device operates in the regime where both the left and the right regions of the BLG sheet are insulating due to a bulk band gap induced by the independently applied displacement fields DL and DR. In the "odd" field configuration, where DLDR < 0, theory predicts the existence of eight conducting modes (referred to as the "kink" states) propagating along the line ...

In semiconductor physics, many essential optoelectronic material parameters can be experimentally revealed via optical spectroscopy in sufficiently large magnetic fields. For monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenide semiconductors, this field scale is substantial—tens of teslas or more—due to heavy carrier masses and huge exciton binding energies. Here we report absorption spectroscopy of monolayer $${{\rm{MoS}}}_{2},{{\rm{MoSe}}}_{2},{{\rm{MoTe}}}_{2}$$ MoS 2 , MoSe 2 , MoTe 2 , and $${{\rm{WS}}}_{2}$$ WS 2 in very high magnetic fields to 91 T. We follow the diamagnetic shifts and valley Zeeman splittings of not only the exciton’s $$1s$$ 1 s ground state but also its excited $$2s,3s,\ldots ,ns$$ 2 s , 3 s , … , n s Rydberg states. This provides a direct experimental measure of the effective (reduced) exciton masses and dielectric properties. Exciton binding energies, exciton radii, and free-particle bandgaps are also determined. The measured exciton masses are heavier than theoretically predicted, especially for Mo-based monolayers. These results provide essential and quantitative parameters for the rational design of opto-electronic van der Waals heterostructures incorporating 2D semiconductors.

We study AC demagnetization in frustrated arrays of single-domain ferromagnetic islands, exhaustively resolving every (Ising-like) magnetic degree of freedom in the systems. Although the net moment of the arrays is brought near zero by a protocol with sufficiently small step size, the final magnetostatic energy of the demagnetized array continues to decrease for finer-stepped protocols and does not extrapolate to the ground state energy. The resulting complex disordered magnetic state can be described by a maximum-entropy ensemble constrained to satisfy just nearestneighbor correlations.