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Chin. Phys. B, 2021, Vol. 30(7): 077104    DOI: 10.1088/1674-1056/abd7d6
Special Issue: SPECIAL TOPIC — Twistronics
SPECIAL TOPIC—Twistronics Prev   Next  

Bilayer twisting as a mean to isolate connected flat bands in a kagome lattice through Wigner crystallization

Jing Wu(吴静)1,2, Yue-E Xie(谢月娥)1,2,†, Ming-Xing Chen(陈明星)3, Jia-Ren Yuan(袁加仁)2, Xiao-Hong Yan(颜晓红)2, Sheng-Bai Zhang(张绳百)4, and Yuan-Ping Chen(陈元平)1,2,‡
1 School of Physics and Optoelectronics, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China;
2 Faculty of Science, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China;
3 School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China;
4 Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA
Abstract  The physics of flat band is novel and rich but difficult to access. In this regard, recently twisting of bilayer van der Waals (vdW)-bounded two-dimensional (2D) materials has attracted much attention, because the reduction of Brillouin zone will eventually lead to a diminishing kinetic energy. Alternatively, one may start with a 2D kagome lattice, which already possesses flat bands at the Fermi level, but unfortunately these bands connect quadratically to other (dispersive) bands, leading to undesirable effects. Here, we propose, by first-principles calculation and tight-binding modeling, that the same bilayer twisting approach can be used to isolate the kagome flat bands. As the starting kinetic energy is already vanishingly small, the interlayer vdW potential is always sufficiently large irrespective of the twisting angle. As such the electronic states in the (connected) flat bands become unstable against a spontaneous Wigner crystallization, which is expected to have interesting interplays with other flat-band phenomena such as novel superconductivity and anomalous quantum Hall effect.
Keywords:  twisted bilayer kagome graphene      flat bands      Wigner crystallization  
Received:  28 October 2020      Revised:  21 December 2020      Accepted manuscript online:  04 January 2021
PACS:  71.15.Mb (Density functional theory, local density approximation, gradient and other corrections)  
  73.22.-f (Electronic structure of nanoscale materials and related systems)  
  73.21.Ac (Multilayers)  
Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11874314). Sheng-Bai Zhang was supported by U.S. DOE under Grant No. DE-SC0002623.
Corresponding Authors:  Yue-E Xie, Yuan-Ping Chen     E-mail:  yueex@ujs.edu.cn;chenyp@xtu.edu.cn

Cite this article: 

Jing Wu(吴静), Yue-E Xie(谢月娥), Ming-Xing Chen(陈明星), Jia-Ren Yuan(袁加仁), Xiao-Hong Yan(颜晓红), Sheng-Bai Zhang(张绳百), and Yuan-Ping Chen(陈元平) Bilayer twisting as a mean to isolate connected flat bands in a kagome lattice through Wigner crystallization 2021 Chin. Phys. B 30 077104

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Ya-Bin Ma(马亚斌), Tao Ouyang(欧阳滔), Yuan-Ping Chen(陈元平), and Yue-E Xie(谢月娥). Chin. Phys. B, 2021, 30(7): 077103.
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