Band conductivity oscillations in a gate-tunable graphene superlattice

Abstract

Electrons exposed to a two-dimensional (2D) periodic potential and a uniform, perpendicular magnetic field exhibit a fractal, self-similar energy spectrum known as the Hofstadter butterfly. Recently, related high-temperature quantum oscillations (Brown-Zak oscillations) were discovered in graphene moiré systems, whose origin lies in the repetitive occurrence of extended minibands/magnetic Bloch states at rational fractions of magnetic flux per unit cell giving rise to an increase in band conductivity. In this work, we report on the experimental observation of band conductivity oscillations in an electrostatically defined and gate-tunable graphene superlattice, which are governed both by the internal structure of the Hofstadter butterfly (Brown-Zak oscillations) and by a commensurability relation between the cyclotron radius of electrons and the superlattice period (Weiss oscillations). We obtain a complete, unified description of band conductivity oscillations in two-dimensional superlattices, yielding a detailed match between theory and experiment.