A valley valve and electron beam splitter

Abstract

Developing alternative paradigms of electronics beyond silicon technology requires the exploration of fundamentally new physical mechanisms, such as the valley-specific phenomena in hexagonal two-dimensional materials. We realize ballistic valley Hall kink states in bilayer graphene and demonstrate gate-controlled current transmission in a four-kink router device. The operations of a waveguide, a valve, and a tunable electron beam splitter are demonstrated. The valley valve exploits the valley-momentum locking of the kink states and reaches an on/off ratio of 8 at zero magnetic field. A magnetic field enables a full-range tunable coherent beam splitter. These results pave a path to building a scalable, coherent quantum transportation network based on the kink states.