Artificial heavy fermions in a van der Waals heterostructure

Heavy-fermion systems represent one of the paradigmatic strongly correlated states of matter1–5. They have been used as a platform for investigating exotic behaviour ranging from quantum criticality and non-Fermi liquid behaviour to unconventional topological superconductivity4–12. The heavy-fermion phenomenon arises from the exchange interaction between localized magnetic moments and conduction electrons leading to Kondo lattice physics, and represents one of the long-standing open problems in quantum materials3. In a Kondo lattice, the exchange interaction gives rise to a band with heavy effective mass. This intriguing phenomenology has so far been realized only in compounds containing rare-earth elements with 4f or 5f electrons1,4,13,14. Here we realize a designer van der Waals heterostructure where artificial heavy fermions emerge from the Kondo coupling between a lattice of localized magnetic moments and itinerant electrons in a 1T/1H-TaS2 heterostructure. We study the heterostructure using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy and show that depending on the stacking order of the monolayers, we can reveal either the localized magnetic moments and the associated Kondo effect, or the conduction electrons with a heavy-fermion hybridization gap. Our experiments realize an ultimately tunable platform for future experiments probing enhanced many-body correlations, dimensional tuning of quantum criticality and unconventional superconductivity in two-dimensional artificial heavy-fermion systems15–17.