Events

Abstract: In condensed matter, flatness is anything but boring: when a band’s energy dispersion becomes nearly flat, electrons lose their kinetic identity and correlations take over, giving rise to exotic physics. In this talk, I will show how to design two-dimensional materials in which flat bands may be engineered and tuned through experimentally accessible “control knobs” including strain, dimensionality interplay, twisting, and heterostructure stacking. I will show how to manipulate different platforms to unlock the power of flat bands physics: for example magnetic ordering in strained kagome lattices [1], emergent superconductivity in otherwise non-superconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides within incommensurate heterostructures [2], twist-tunable spin textures [3], and the delicate interplay between one-dimensional charge-density waves and two-dimensional interactions in rectangular lattices [4]. These examples illustrate how controlling flatness via ab initio predictions transforms materials into laboratories for emergent quantum phenomena for future devices applications.

[1] G. Cantele, F. Conte, L. Zullo, D. Ninno, Phys. Rev. B, 106, 085418 (2022).
[2] L. Zullo, G. Marini, T. Cren, M. Calandra, Nano Lett. 2023, 23, 14, 6658-6663 (2023).
[3] L. Zullo, D. Ninno, G. Cantele, Phys. Rev. B 110, 165411 (2024).
[4] X. Luo*, L. Zullo*, S. Patel, D. Oh, Q. Song, A.K. Kundu, A. Rajapitamahuni, E. Vescovo, N. Olszowska, R. Kurleto, D. Wutke, G. Sangiovanni, R. Comin, arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.15080, (2025).