Publications by authors named "Caitlin L Patterson"

Graphite exhibits a range of metastable stacking orders, with the number of possible configurations increasing exponentially with the number of layers. Most experimental studies have focused on Bernal and rhombohedral stacking due to the difficulty of identifying and isolating intermediate stacking orders. Motivated by this challenge, we present two atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques that unambiguously distinguish stacking orders and defects in graphite flakes.

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Graphene and transition metal dichalcogenide flat-band systems show similar phase diagrams, replete with magnetic and superconducting phases. An abiding question has been whether magnetic ordering competes with superconductivity or facilitates pairing. For example, recent studies of Bernal bilayer graphene in the presence of enhanced spin-orbit coupling show a substantial increase in the observed domain and critical temperature T of superconducting states; however, the mechanism for this enhancement remains unknown.

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Magnetism typically arises from the effect of exchange interactions on highly localized fermionic wavefunctions in f- and d-atomic orbitals. By contrast, in rhombohedral multilayer graphene (RMG), magnetism-manifesting as spontaneous polarization into one or more spin and valley flavours-originates from itinerant electrons near a Van Hove singularity. Here we show experimentally that the electronic entropy in this system indicates signatures typically associated with disordered local magnetic moments, unexpected for electrons in a fully itinerant metal.

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Inducing superconducting correlations in chiral edge states is predicted to generate topologically protected zero energy modes with exotic quantum statistics. Experimental efforts so far have focused on engineering interfaces between superconducting materials-typically amorphous metals-and semiconducting quantum Hall or quantum anomalous Hall systems. However, the strong interfacial disorder inherent in this approach can prevent the formation of isolated topological modes.

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In conventional superconductors, Cooper pairing occurs between electrons of opposite spin. We observe spin-polarized superconductivity in Bernal bilayer graphene when doped to a saddle-point van Hove singularity generated by large applied perpendicular electric field. We observe a cascade of electrostatic gate-tuned transitions between electronic phases distinguished by their polarization within the isospin space defined by the combination of the spin and momentum-space valley degrees of freedom.

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