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Flat bands, Dirac cones, and higher-order band crossings in twisted multilayer graphene

Mathematical Physics 2025-08-05 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons Analysis of PDEs math.MP Spectral Theory

Abstract

For the chiral limit of two sheets of nn-layer Bernal-stacked graphene established in the Physical Review Letters arXiv:2109.10325 and arXiv:2109.11514, we prove a trichotomy: depending on the twisting angle, we have either (1) generically, the band crossing of the first two bands is of order nn; or (2) at a discrete set of magic angles, the first two bands are completely flat; or (3) for another discrete set of twisting parameters, the bands exhibit Dirac cones. This new mathematical discovery disproves the common belief in physics that such a twisted multilayer graphene model can only have higher order band crossings or flat bands, and it leads to a new type of topological phase transition.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02011,
  title  = {Flat bands, Dirac cones, and higher-order band crossings in twisted multilayer graphene},
  author = {Bryan Li and Mengxuan Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02011},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

19 pages; comments are welcome