High-resolution Tunneling Spectroscopy of ABA-stacked Trilayer Graphene

Abstract: ABA-stacked trilayer graphene (TLG), the simplest system consisting of both massless and massive Dirac fermions, is expected to exhibit many interesting broken-symmetry quantum Hall states and interaction-induced phenomena. However, difficulties in microscopically identifying the stacking order of the TLG and limited spectroscopic resolution have stymied experimental probes of these interesting states and phenomena in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) studies. Here we studied the detailed features of the electronic structure in the ABA TLG by using high-resolution STM measurements. Landau-level (LL) crossings of the massless and massive Dirac fermions, and effective mass renormalization of the massive Dirac fermions were observed, indicating strong electron-electron interactions in the ABA TLG. Most unexpectedly, we observed unconventional splittings of the lowest LLs for both the massless and massive Dirac fermions in high perpendicular magnetic fields. These splittings of the LLs, which are beyond the description of tight-binding calculations, reveal unexplored broken-symmetry quantum Hall states in the ABA TLG induced by many-body effects.