Possible correlated insulating states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene under strongly competing interactions

Abstract

We investigate correlated insulating states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) by the exact diagonalization method applied to the extended Hubbard model with interaction parameters recently evaluated in the realistic effective model. Our model can handle the competing interactions among Wannier orbitals owing to their significant overlap, which is a crucial but overlooked aspect of the magic-angle TBG. We propose two candidates for the correlated insulating states: spin- and valley-ferromagnetic band insulator and the Dirac semimetallic state for two flavors with peculiar renormalization, where a flavor denotes a combined degree of freedom with spin and valley. One of the important consequences for the latter candidate is that it allows van Hove singularity near half-filling of the whole band structure (i.e. near the Dirac points) to play some role in superconductivity. The consistency between the two flavor degrees of freedom for the Dirac semimetallic state and the two-fold degeneracy of the Landau level observed in the experiment is also noteworthy.