Non-Abelian Fractional Chern Insulators and Competing States in Flat Moiré Bands

Abstract

Breakthrough experiments have recently realized fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) in moiré materials. However, all states observed are Abelian, the possible existence of more exotic non-Abelian FCIs remains controversial both experimentally and theoretically. Here, we investigate the competition between charge density wave (CDW) order, gapless composite fermion liquid (CFL), and non-Abelian Moore-Read states at half-filling of a moiré band. Although groundstate (quasi-)degeneracies and spectral flow are not sufficient for distinguishing between charge order and Moore-Read states, we find evidence using entanglement spectroscopy that both these states of matter can be realized with Coulomb interactions. By further analyzing the graviton excitations of Moore-Read states, we unveil that the ground states exhibit a mixed behavior of Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian, despite the weak breaking of particle-hole symmetry. In a double twisted bilayer graphene model, transitions between these phases can be driven by the coupling strength between the layers: at weak coupling there is a CFL phase and at strong coupling a CDW order emerges. Remarkably, however, there is compelling evidence for a non-Abelian Moore-Read FCI phase at intermediate coupling.

Published in PRL as an Editors' Suggestion

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• Topological Order Without Band Topology in Moiré Graphene
• Refining Heuristic Predictors of Fractional Chern Insulators using Machine Learning
• Exciton-Anyon Binding in Fractional Chern Insulators: Spectral Fingerprints