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Title: Magic angle hierarchy in twisted graphene multilayers

Journal Article · · Physical Review. B

When two monolayers of graphene are stacked with a small relative twist angle, the resulting band structure exhibits a remarkably flat pair of bands at a sequence of "magic angles" where correlation effects can induce a host of exotic phases. Here we study a class of related models of n-layered graphene with an alternating relative twist angle ±θ which exhibits magic angle flat bands coexisting with several Dirac dispersing bands at the moiré K point. Remarkably, we find that the Hamiltonian for the multilayer system can be mapped exactly to a set of decoupled bilayers at different angles, revealing a remarkable hierarchy mathematically relating all these magic angles to the TBG case. For the trilayer case (n=3), we show that the sequence of magic angle is obtained by multiplying the bilayer magic angles by $$\sqrt{2}$$, whereas the quadrilayer case (n=4) has two sequences of magic angles obtained by multiplying the bilayer magic angles by the golden ratio φ=($$\sqrt{5}$$+1)/2≈1.62 and its inverse. We also show that for larger n, we can tune the angle to obtain several narrow (almost flat) bands simultaneously and that for n → ∞, there is a continuum of magic angles for θ ≲ 2°. Furthermore, we show that tuning several perfectly flat bands for a small number of layers is possible if the coupling between different layers is different. Furthermore, the setup proposed here can be readily achieved by repeatedly applying the "tear and stack" method without the need of any extra tuning of the twist angle and has the advantage that the first magic angle is always larger than the bilayer case.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; W911NF-14-1-0003; SC0007870; SC0019030
OSTI ID:
1572042
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1546832
Journal Information:
Physical Review. B, Vol. 100, Issue 8; ISSN 2469-9950
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 124 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (5)


Figures / Tables (6)