You are cordially invited to the SCL online seminar of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, which will be held on Thursday, 14 April 2022 at 14:00 on Zoom. The talk entitled

Symmetry breaking and Chern insulators in twisted graphene structures

will be given by Dr. Louk Rademaker (Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Geneva, Switzerland). Abstract of the talk:

Twisted bilayer graphene (tBG) and variants like twisted monolayer-bilayer graphene (tMBG) were proposed to be a platform for strongly correlated physics akin to the cuprate family. However, we will show that many of the observed interacting phenomena can be explained in terms of breaking of spin/valley symmetry. To do so, we will first describe how flat bands in tBG can be directly observed using ARPES [1]. An effective description of the flat bands is hampered by band renormalization due to charge transfer [2] and band topology. The combination of interactions and topology naturally leads to spin/valley symmetry breaking with a quantum anomalous Hall effect in tMBG [3]. In tBG in large magnetic fields, similar spin/valley symmetry breaking creates a series of Chern insulator states [4]. We will conclude with a brief discussion of the possibility of genuine strong correlations in Moiré structures.

[1] S. Lisi, X. Lu, T. Benschop, et al., Nature Phys. 17, 189 (2021).
[2] L. Rademaker, D. A. Abanin, P. Mellado, Phys. Rev. B 100, 205114 (2019).
[3] L. Rademaker, I. V. Protopopov, D. A. Abanin, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033150 (2020).
[4] Y. Saito, J. Ge, L. Rademaker, et al., Nat. Phys. 17, 478 (2021).

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•