Negative compressibility in graphene-terminated black phosphorus heterostructures

Negative compressibility in graphene-terminated black phosphorus heterostructures. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Negative compressibility is a many-body effect wherein strong correlations give rise to an enhanced gate capacitance in two-dimensional (2D) electronic systems. We observe capacitance enhancement in a newly emerged 2D layered material, atomically thin black phosphorus (BP). The encapsulation of BP by hexagonal boron nitride sheets with few-layer graphene as a terminal ensures ultraclean heterostructure interfaces, allowing us to observe negative compressibility at low hole carrier concentrations. We explain the negative compressibility based on the Coulomb correlation among in-plane charges and their image charges in a gate electrode in the framework of Debye screening.