Coulomb-driven band unflattening suppresses K-phonon pairing in moire graphene
Physical Review B American Physical Society
Abstract:
It is a matter of current debate whether the gate-tunable superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene is phonon-mediated or arises from electron-electron interactions. The recent observation of the strong coupling of electrons to so-called K-phonon modes in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments has resuscitated early proposals that K-phonons drive superconductivity. We show that the bandwidth-enhancing effect of interactions drastically weakens both the intrinsic susceptibility towards pairing as well as the screening of Coulomb repulsion that is essential for the phonon attraction to dominate at low temperature. This rules out purely K-phonon-mediated superconductivity with the observed transition temperature of ∼1 K. We conclude that the unflattening of bands by Coulomb interactions challenges any purely phonon-driven pairing mechanism, and must be addressed by a successful theory of superconductivity in moiré grapheneDivergent nonlinear response from quasiparticle interactions
Physical Review Letters American Physical Society
Excitonic fractional quantum Hall hierarchy in Moiré heterostructures
Physical Review B: Condensed Matter and Materials Physics American Physical Society
Abstract:
We consider fractional quantum Hall states in systems where two flat Chern number $C=\pm 1$ bands are labeled by an approximately conserved 'valley' index and interchanged by time reversal symmetry. At filling factor $\nu=1$ this setting admits an unusual hierarchy of correlated phases of excitons, neutral particle-hole pair excitations of a fully valley-polarized `orbital ferromagnet' parent state where all electrons occupy a single valley. Excitons experience an effective magnetic field due to the Chern numbers of the underlying bands. This obstructs their condensation in favor of a variety of crystalline orders and gapped and gapless liquid states. All these have the same quantized charge Hall response and are electrically incompressible, but differ in their edge structure, orbital magnetization, and hence valley and thermal responses. We explore the relevance of this scenario for Moir\'e heterostructures of bilayer graphene on a hexagonal boron nitride substrate.Global phase diagram of the normal state of twisted bilayer graphene
Physical Review Letters American Physical Society
Abstract:
We investigate the full doping and strain-dependent phase diagram (absent superconductivity) of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (TBG). Using comprehensive Hartree-Fock calculations, we show that at temperatures where superconductivity is absent the global phase structure can be understood based on the competition and coexistence between three types of intertwined orders: a fully symmetric phase, spatially uniform flavor-symmetry-breaking states, and an incommensurate Kekul\'e spiral (IKS) order. For small strain, the IKS phase, recently proposed as a candidate order at all non-zero integer fillings of the moir\'e unit cell, is found to be ubiquitous for non-integer doping as well. We demonstrate that the corresponding electronic compressibility and Fermi surface structure are consistent with the 'cascade' physics and Landau fans observed experimentally.Hydrodynamic non-linear response of interacting integrable systems
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA National Academy of Sciences