Spin-valley coupling in single-electron bilayer graphene quantum dots
Understanding how the electron spin is coupled to orbital degrees of freedom, such as a valley degree of freedom in solid-state systems is central to applications in spin-based electronics and quantum computation. Recent developments in the preparation of electrostatically-confined quantum dots in gapped bilayer graphene (BLG) enables to study the low-energy single-electron spectra in BLG quantum dots, which is crucial for potential spin and spin-valley qubit operations. Here, we present the observation of the spin-valley coupling in a bilayer graphene quantum dot in the single-electron regime. By making use of a highly-tunable double quantum dot device we achieve an energy resolution allowing us to resolve the lifting of the fourfold spin and valley degeneracy by a Kane-Mele type spin-orbit coupling of $\approx 65~\mu$eV. Also, we find an upper limit of a potentially disorder-induced mixing of the $K$ and $K'$ states below $20~\mu$eV.
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