2D Materials – Physics of
van der Waals [hetero]structures

Creating many-body states in two-dimensional van-der-Waals heterostructures by design

Principal investigator

Wouter Jolie, II. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu Köln

Abstract

The goal is to create van-der-Waals heterostructures in which the top layer (MoS₂) hosts a fully accessible localized spin, which couples to the correlated quasiparticles in the bottom layer. When the quasiparticles in the bottom layer are described by Fermi liquid theory, coupling to the spin in the top layer produces a Kondo resonance. In contrast, when the quasiparticles condense to Cooper pairs, Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) bound states emerge inside the superconducting gap close to the Fermi energy. Lastly, exotic magnetic ground states are proposed when the localized spin couples to a quantum spin liquid.

The heterostructures will be grown via molecular beam epitaxy and transferred in-situ into our low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopes. The experimental results will be corroborated by state-of-the-art theoretical models, which enable us to gain insights on the microscopic interactions present in such systems.