Moire Is Different

Abstract

Graphene, as the thinnest material ever found, exhibits unconventionally relativistic behaviour of Dirac fermions. However, unusual phenomena (such as superconductivity) arise when stacking two graphene layers and twisting the bilayer graphene. The relativistic Dirac fermion in graphene has been widely studied and understood, but the large change observed in twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) is intriguing and still unclear because only van der Waals force (vdW) interlayer interaction is added from graphene to TBG and such a very weak interaction is expected to play a negligible role. To understand such dramatic variation, we studied the electronic structures of monolayer, bilayer and twisted bilayer graphene. Twisted bilayer graphene creates different moiré patterns when turned at different angles. We proposed tight-binding and effective continuum models and thereby drafted a computer code to calculate their electronic structures. Our calculated results show that the electronic structure of twisted bilayer graphene changes significantly even by a tiny twist. When bilayer graphene is twisted at special “magic angles”, flat bands appear. We examined how these flat bands are created, their properties and the relevance to some unconventional physical property such as superconductivity. We conclude that in the nanoscopic scale, similar looking atomic structures can create vastly different electronic structures. Like how P. W. Anderson stated that similar looking fields in science can have differences in his article “More is Different”, similar moiré patterns in twisted bilayer graphene can produce different electronic structures.