2025/04/04 by Sayed Ali Akbar Ghorashi, Jennifer Cano, Ghorashi, Sayed Ali Akbar +3 · 4 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphene research and applications #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.03842
openalex publication_date 2025/04/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Coupling photonic cavity fields to electronic degrees of freedom in 2D materials introduces an additional control knob to the toolbox of solid-state engineering. Here we demonstrate a subtle competition between cavity frequency and interlayer tunneling in graphene stacks that is responsible for topological phase transitions in light-matter Hilbert space and that cannot be captured by mean-field theory in vacuum. A systematic exploration of multilayer graphene heterostructures and stacking configurations in a chiral tHz cavity reveals that linear dispersion enhances the low-energy cavity-induced topological gap. Furthermore, in bilayer graphene, a displacement field drives the low-energy vacuum band from valley-Chern to Chern insulator, comprising a gate-tunable topological phase transition. Our findings pave the way for future control and engineering of graphene heterostructures with chiral cavity fields.