English

Topological flat bands without magic angles in massive twisted bilayer graphenes

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2020-03-18 v1

Abstract

Twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) hosts nearly flat bands with narrow bandwidths of a few meV at certain {\em magic} twist angles. Here we show that in twisted gapped Dirac material bilayers, or massive twisted bilayer graphenes (MTBG), isolated nearly flat bands below a threshold bandwidth WcW_c are expected for continuous small twist angles up to a critical θc\theta_c depending on the flatness of the original bands and the interlayer coupling strength. Narrow bandwidths of WW \lesssim 30 meV are expected for θ3\theta \lesssim 3^{\circ} for twisted Dirac materials with intrinsic gaps of 2\sim 2 eV that finds realization in monolayers of gapped transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDC), silicon carbide (SiC) among others, and even narrower bandwidths in hexagonal boron nitride (BN) whose gaps are 5\sim 5 eV, while twisted graphene systems with smaller gaps of a few tens of meV, e.g. due to alignment with hexagonal boron nitride, show vestiges of the magic angles behavior in the bandwidth evolution. The phase diagram of finite valley Chern numbers of the isolated moire bands expands with increasing difference between the sublattice selective interlayer tunneling parameters. The valley contrasting circular dichroism for interband optical transitions is constructive near 00^{\circ} and destructive near 6060^{\circ} alignments and can be tuned through electric field and gate driven polarization of the mini-valleys. Combining massive Dirac materials with various intrinsic gaps, Fermi velocities, interlayer tunneling strengths suggests optimistic prospects of increasing θc\theta_c and achieving correlated states with large U/WU/W effective interaction versus bandwidth ratios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.08783,
  title  = {Topological flat bands without magic angles in massive twisted bilayer graphenes},
  author = {Srivani Javvaji and Jinhua Sun and Jeil Jung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.08783},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

23 pages, 18 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:48:34.636Z