paper

Time-evolution patterns of electrons in twisted bilayer graphene

arXiv:1901.02794 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.99.165127

Abstract

We characterise the dynamics of electrons in twisted bilayer graphene by analysing the time-evolution of electron waves in the atomic lattice. We perform simulations based on a kernel polynomial technique using Chebyshev polynomial; this method does not requires any diagonalisation of the system Hamiltonian. Our simulations reveal that the inter-layer electronic coupling induces the exchange of waves between the two graphene layers. This wave transfer manifests as oscillations of the layer-integrated probability densities as a function of time. For the bilayer case, it also causes a difference in the wavefront dynamics compared to monolayer graphene. The intra-layer spreading of electron waves is irregular and progresses as a two-stage process. The first one characterised by a well-defined wavefront occurs in a short time | a wavefront forms instead during the second stage. The wavefront takes a hexagon-like shape with the vertices developing faster than the edges. Though the detail spreading form of waves depends on initial states, we observe localisation of waves in specific regions of the moiré zone. To characterise the electron dynamics, we also analyse the time auto-correlation functions. We show that these quantities shall exhibit the beating modulation when reducing the interlayer coupling.

arXiv comment14 pages, 11 figures

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