Graphene and twistronics, Kavli Prize, 2026 - Rutgers, MIT, UT Austin

[Astronuc]

Professor Eva Andrei and two other physicists — Pablo Jarillo-Herrero from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Allan H. MacDonald from the University of Texas at Austin — will share a $1 million prize for their work discovering how twisting ultrathin sheets of carbon at precise angles can transform their electronic properties.

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/physic...professor-earn-kavli-prize-one-highest-honors

Andrei will share the Kavli Prize in nanoscience with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Allan H. MacDonald from the University of Texas at Austin, for foundational work that established the field of twistronics, a combination of the words “twist” and “electronics.”

Andrei's early research laid the groundwork for twistronics before anyone knew the field would ever exist. Her lab at Rutgers was the first to show that stacking two sheets of graphene — pure carbon, each just one atom thick, arranged in a honeycomb — with a slight twist between them could completely transform their electronic properties.

That twist, applied at a microscopic level, allows scientists to dial a single material from metal to insulator to superconductor simply by adjusting the voltage — a level of control that was previously unimaginable.

“The electronic properties were not just tweaked, they were transformed,” Andrei said. “We discovered that the new pattern causes a dramatic reconstruction of how electrons behave, one that depends exquisitely on the angle of the twist.”

I'd never heard about 'twistronics' before. I search this forum for the term, and it did not appear.

The idea of twisting two atomically thin sheets of graphene was so fundamentally unheard of in 2009 that when Andrei submitted her findings, the editor of Science magazine refused to send the paper out for peer review. It was eventually published in Nature Physics.

In a remarkable parallel, a separate paper on other graphene research met the same fate at Science and was also rejected without peer review. Eventually published in Nature, it was named Science's Breakthrough of the Year in 2009.

"As a delicious plot twist, the same journal that had refused to send one of Eva Andrei's papers to peer review described that research as the 'scientific breakthrough of the year' in 2009," said Mari-Ann Einarsrud, chair of the Kavli Prize Committee in Nanoscience.

Twistronics and heterolayers​

https://www.nature.com/collections/hiabihcjae

Twistronics is a rapidly developing field in the area of two-dimensional materials. By simply adjusting the angle – or twist – between layers of two-dimensional materials, one can control the electrical properties of the complete system to produce incredible effects such as switching between non-conducting and superconducting states.

Apparently it's not just graphene, but bi-layers of various types of compounds.

A discovery six years ago took the condensed-matter physics world by storm: Ultra-thin carbon stacked in two slightly askew layers became a superconductor, and changing the twist angle between layers could toggle their electrical properties. The landmark 2018 paper describing “magic-angle graphene superlattices” launched a new field called “twistronics,” and the first author was then-MIT graduate student and recent Harvard Junior Fellow Yuan Cao.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/a-smoother-way-to-study-twistronics/ (September 16, 2024)

Straintronics and twistronics in bilayer graphene (open access))
Federico Escudero, et al.
Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023225 – Published 29 May, 2026
https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/r8sv-6xmp

The discovery of correlated phases and unconventional superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) has attracted significant attention over the last few years . These phenomena are intrinsically connected to the emergence of very flat bands due to the moiré potential , induced by the lattice mismatch created by the twist or strain . The quenching of the kinetic energy in the flat bands promotes the appearance of the observed electronic correlations. Any approach to understand the nature of the correlated phases in TBG must then start from a solid understanding of the nature and origin of the flat bands, supported by accurate modeling methods.