Optical imprinting of superlattices in two-dimensional materials published in PRR

Recently, superlattice structures in two-dimensional materials, such as Moire patterns, have drawn wide interests. While most of the pre-existing methods create superlattice in passive ways, we proposed an optical method of shining circularly polarized and spatially periodic laser fields

to imprint superlattice structures in two-dimensional electronic systems. By changing the configuration of the optical field, we synthesize various lattice structures with different spatial symmetry, periodicity, and strength. We find that the wide optical tunability allows one to tune different properties of the effective band structure, including the Chern number, energy bandwidths, and band gaps. The in situ tunability of the superlattice gives rise to unique physics ranging from the topological transitions to the creation of the flat bands through the kagome superlattice, which can allow a realization of strongly correlated phenomena in Floquet systems. We consider the high-frequency regime where the electronic system can remain in the quasi-equilibrium phase for an extended amount of time. The spatiotemporal reconfigurability of the present scheme opens up possibilities to control light-matter interaction to generate novel electronic states and optoelectronic devices. This article is published in Physics Review Research.