Event Details

When two graphene sheets are stacked offset by the ‘magic’ twist angle, the bands become incredibly flat, allowing interactions to dominate. Depending on filling and sample details, remarkably, superconductivity and various other correlated phenomena are observed in this system. The importance of the `magic’ angle, however, has recently been challenged by experiments that observe superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene with a WSe2 substrate at twist angles as low as 0.8°. I argue that the primary direct effect of WSe2 is to induce spin orbit coupling in the graphene monolayer immediately adjacent to it. Importantly, with the introduction of spin orbit coupling, all of the ingredients needed for the emergence of Majorana fermions, the key components to certain implementations of topological quantum computation, are found intrinsically within this single system. I outline one proposal and discuss some of the challenges that lie ahead.