Degenerate flat bands in twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

We prove that in the chiral limit of the Bistritzer--MacDonald Hamiltonian, there exist magic angles at which the Hamiltonian exhibits flat bands of multiplicity four instead of two. We analyse the structure of Bloch functions associated with the bands of arbitrary multiplicity, compute the corresponding Chern number to be $-1$, and show that there exist infinitely many degenerate magic angles for a generic choice of tunnelling potential, including the Bistritzer--MacDonald potential. Moreover, we demonstrate for generic tunnelling potentials flat bands have only twofold or fourfold multiplicities.

Generalized and streamlined results to flat bands with arbitrary allowed multiplicities including the structure of Bloch function zeros, their spectral subspace representations, and the Chern numbers of Bloch bundles