Collective excitations of the Chern-insulator states in commensurate double moiré superlattices of twisted bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

Xianqing Lin; Quan Zhou; Cheng Li; Jun Ni

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.107.195434

paper

Collective excitations of the Chern-insulator states in commensurate double moiré superlattices of twisted bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

arXiv:2301.05359 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.107.195434

Abstract

We study the collective excitation modes of the Chern insulator states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride (TBG/BN) at odd integer fillings ( $ν$ ) of the flat bands. For the $1 \times 1$ commensurate double moiré superlattices in TBG/BN at three twist angles ( $θ^{'}$ ) between BN and graphene, self-consistent Hartree-Fock calculations show that the electron-electron interaction and the broken $C_{2 z}$ symmetry lead to the Chern-insulator ground states with valley-spin flavor polarized HF bands at odd $ν$ . In the active-band approximation, the HF bands in the same flavor of TBG/BN are much more separated than those of the pristine TBG with TBG/BN having a larger intra-flavor band gap so that the energies of the lowest intra-flavor exciton modes of TBG/BN computed within the time-dependent HF method are much higher than those of TBG and reach about 20 meV, and the exciton wavefunctions of TBG/BN become less localized than those of TBG. The inter-flavor valley-wave modes in TBG/BN have excitation energies higher than 2.5 meV which is also much larger than that of TBG, while the spin-wave modes all have zero excitation gap. In contrast to TBG with particle-hole symmetric excitation modes for positive and negative $ν$ , the excitation spectrums and gaps of TBG/BN at positive $ν$ are rather different from those at negative $ν$ . The quantitative behavior of the excitation spectrum of TBG/BN also varies with $θ^{'}$ . Full HF calculations demonstrate that more HF bands besides the two central bands can have rather large contributions from the single-particle flat-band states, then the lowest exciton modes that determine the optical properties of the Chern insulator states in TBG/BN are generally the ones between the remote and flat-like bands, while the valley-wave modes have similar energies as those in the active-band approximation.

arXiv comment9 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (1)

Atomistic theory of moiré Hofstadter's butterfly in magic-angle graphene