Graphene is a quantum spin Hall insulator, with a nontrivial topological gap induced by the spin-orbit coupling. Such splitting is weak (~45µeV) in the absence of external magnetic field. However, due to rather long spin-relaxation time, graphene is an attractive candidate for applications in quantum technologies. When it is encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride, the coupling between graphene and the substrate compensates intrinsic spin-orbit coupling and decreases the nontrivial topological gap, which may lead to phase transition into a trivial band insulator state. In this work, we have measured experimentally the zero-field splittings in monolayer and bilayer graphene by the means of subterahertz photoconductivity-based electron spin resonance technique. The dependance in temperature of such splittings have been also studied in the 2-12K range. We observed a decrease of the spin splittings with increasing temperature. Such behavior might be understood from several physical mechanisms that could induce a temperature dependence of the spin-orbit coupling. These includes the difference in the expansion coefficients between the graphene and the boron nitride substrate or the metal contacts, the electronphonon interactions, and the presence of a magnetic order at low temperature.

We report on the emission of Terahertz radiation from Landau quantized Dirac electrons in HgTe/CdHgTe based quantum wells. We show that this cyclotron emission is continuously tunable with magnetic field from 500 GHz up to 2.5 THz. Moreover, given the relativistic nature of charge carriers, the cyclotron mass and therefore the emitted frequency are also tunable with the electron density. These results pave the way for the long-awaited Landau laser which could additionally be tunable by a gate voltage with a fixed magnetic field.

Two-dimensional Dirac fermions in HgTe quantum wells close to the topological phase transition can generate significant cyclotron emission that is magnetic field tunable in the terahertz frequency range. Due to their relativistic-like dynamics, their cyclotron mass is strongly dependent on their electron concentration in the quantum well, providing a second tunability lever and paving the way for a gate-tunable, permanent-magnet Landau laser. In this work, we demonstrate the proof-of-concept of such a back-gate tunable THz cyclotron emitter at a fixed magnetic field. The emission frequency detected at 1.5 T is centered at 2.2 THz and can already be electrically tuned over 250 GHz. With an optimized gate and a realistic permanent magnet of 1.0 T, we estimate that the cyclotron emission could be continuously and rapidly tunable by the gate bias between 1 and 3 THz, that is to say on the less covered part of the THz gap.

We report on transport measurements in monolayer MoS2 devices, close to the bottom of the conduction band edge. These devices were annealed in situ before electrical measurements. This allows us to obtain good ohmic contacts at low temperatures, and to measure precisely the conductivity and mobility via four-probe measurements. The measured effective mobility up to μ eff = 180 cm 2 V −1 s −1 is among the largest obtained in CVD-grown MoS2 monolayer devices. These measurements show that electronic transport is of the insulating type for σ ≤ 1.4 e 2 / h and n ≤ 1.7 × 10 12 cm −2 , and a crossover to a metallic regime is observed above those values. In the insulating regime, thermally activated transport dominates at high temperature ( T > 120 K). At lower temperatures, conductivity is driven by Efros–Schklovkii variable range hopping in all measured devices, with a universal and constant hopping prefactor, that is a clear indication that hopping is not phonon-mediated. At higher carrier density, and high temperature, the conductivity is well modeled by the Boltzmann equation for a non-interacting Fermi gas, taking into account both phonon and impurity scatterings. Finally, even if this apparent metal-insulator transition can be explained by phonon-related phenomena at high temperature, the possibility of a genuine 2D MIT cannot be ruled out, as we can observe a clear power-law diverging localization length close to the transition, and a one-parameter scaling can be realized.

Since the emergence of graphene, we have seen several proposals for the realization of Landau lasers tunable over the terahertz frequency range. The hope was that the non-equidistance of the Landau levels from Dirac fermions would suppress the harmful non-radiative Auger recombination. Unfortunately, even with this non-equidistance, an unfavourable non-radiative process persists in Landau-quantized graphene, and so far no cyclotron emission from Dirac fermions has been reported. One way to eliminate this last non-radiative process is to sufficiently modify the dispersion of the Landau levels by opening a small gap in the linear band structure. HgTe quantum wells close to the topological phase transition are a proven example of such gapped graphene-like materials. In this work we experimentally demonstrate Landau emission from Dirac fermions in such HgTe quantum wells, where the emission is tunable by both the magnetic field and the carrier concentration. Consequently, these results represent an advance in the realization of terahertz Landau lasers tunable by a magnetic field and gate voltage.