Cryogenic platform for the study of correlated 2D materials with tunable degrees of freedom

The proposed instrumentation is a cryo-free dilution fridge capable of operating at temperatures below 20 mK, in magnetic fields up to 14 T. The instrument will be designed to accommodate newly discovered approaches by the PI that allow in-situ manipulation and characterization of heterostructures fabricated from 2D layered materials. These techniques include mechanical manipulation of rotational ordering using a scan-probe platform, tuning interlayer interaction strength via application of high pressures, and capacitance-based spectroscopy for local compressibility measurement. This combination of techniques will be applied to studying novel correlated states with a focus on systems that may exhibit generalized non-abelian excitations. While several resent discoveries have revealed that controlling the mechanical degrees of freedom available in vdW heterostructures provides a new and unique approach to materials design, in most prior studies samples are fabricated with a fixed set of structural parameters. By contrast the PI has demonstrated, in a series of recent reports, new approaches to device architectures that enable in-situ control of these parameters allowing for dynamic control over emergent quantum phenomena. The proposed new instrumentation will uniquely integrate all of these capabilities into a single cryo-genic platform.