Designer bandstructures in bilayer graphene by superlattice patterning

With a locally tunable band gap on the order of 100meV, bilayer graphene is a simple yet promising 2D material with various potential applications in nanoelectronics. The electronic structure of bilayer graphene can be engineered by a superlattice, producing novel effects including Brilliouin zone folding, additional Dirac fermions and Hofstader’s butterfly. Here we present our magneto-transport data from bilayer graphene devices with electrostatically-defined superlattices whose wavelength can be as small as 35nm. In addition, we compare these data with our previous data on monolayer graphene superlattices and predictions from various theoretical models. Based on these results, we also discuss the feasibility of creating graphene antidot lattices using bilayer graphene dielectric superlattices. Previous theoretical studies have shown that such lattices are capable of inducing localized electronic states with a long spin-coherence time and therefore a candidate for carbon-based qubits for quantum computing.