English

Bistritzer-MacDonald dynamics in twisted bilayer graphene

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2023-03-29 v3 Mathematical Physics Analysis of PDEs math.MP

Abstract

The Bistritzer-MacDonald (BM) model, introduced in \cite{Bistritzer2011}, attempts to capture the electronic properties of twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), even at incommensurate twist angles, by an effective periodic model over the bilayer moir\'e pattern. Starting from a tight-binding model, we identify a regime where the BM model emerges as the effective dynamics for electrons modeled as wave-packets spectrally concentrated at the monolayer Dirac points, up to error that can be rigorously estimated. Using measured values of relevant physical constants, we argue that this regime is realized in TBG at the first "magic" angle.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.13767,
  title  = {Bistritzer-MacDonald dynamics in twisted bilayer graphene},
  author = {Alexander B. Watson and Tianyu Kong and Allan H. MacDonald and Mitchell Luskin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.13767},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

50 pages, 9 figures. Fixed wave-packet scaling, bounded some higher-order terms in the residual, and added reference to Bal-Cazeaux-Massatt-Quinn. Bounding the higher-order terms required strengthening our assumption on the regularity of initial data

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:17:17.536Z