Nuclear-induced dephasing and signatures of hyperfine effects in isotopically purified 13C graphene

Abstract

The hyperfine interaction between the spins of electrons and nuclei is both a blessing and a curse. It can provide a wealth of information when used as an experimental probing technique but it can also be destructive when it acts as a dephasive perturbation on the electronic system. In this paper, we fabricated large-scale single and multilayer isotopically purified 13C graphene Hall bars to search for interaction effects between the nuclear magnetic moments and the electronic system. We find signatures of nuclei with a spin in the analysis of the weak localization phenomenon that shows a significant dichotomy in the scattering times of monolayer 12C and 13C graphene close to the Dirac point. Microwave-induced electron spin flips were exploited to transfer momentum to the nuclei and build-up a nuclear field. The presence of a very weak nuclear field is encoded in a modulation of the electron Zeeman energy which shifts the energy for resonant absorption and reduces the g factor.