Yang-Mills flows for multilayered graphene
Abstract
We clarify the origin of magic angles in twisted multilayered graphene using Yang-Mills flows in two dimensions. We relate the effective Hamiltonian describing the electrons in the multilayered graphene to the operator on a two dimensional torus coupled to an gauge field. Despite the absence of a characteristic class such as relevant for the quantum Hall effect, we show that there are topological invariants associated with the zero modes occuring in a family of Hamiltonians. The flatbands in the spectrum of the effective Hamiltonian are associated with Yang-Mills connections, studied by M.Atiyah and R.Bott long time ago. The emergent magnetic field with nonzero flux is presumably responsible for the observed Hall effect in the absence of (external) magnetic field. We provide a numeric algorithm transforming the original single-particle Hamiltonian to the direct sum of operators coupled to abelian gauge fields with non-zero 's. Our perspective gives a simple bound for magic angles: if the gauge field is such that the YM energy is smaller than that of magnetic flux embedded into , then is not magic.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.19097,
title = {Yang-Mills flows for multilayered graphene},
author = {Vasilii Iugov and Nikita Nekrasov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19097},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
30 pages, 8 figures; v2. 31 pp, added refs and details of the analysis of higher fluxes and numerics