Effect of structural relaxation on the electronic structure of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

TL;DR

This study investigates how structural relaxation affects the electronic, optical, and transport properties of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride, revealing the importance of relaxation for accurately modeling observed phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a fully atomistic relaxation model to analyze the electronic structure of graphene on hBN, highlighting the significance of relaxation effects on electronic features.

Findings

Structural relaxation is crucial for accurate electronic property predictions.

The model reproduces experimentally observed Dirac points and Hofstadter butterfly patterns.

Electronic structure is sensitive to many-body effects on the local energy gap.

Abstract

We performed calculations of electronic, optical and transport properties of graphene on hBN with realistic moir\'e patterns. The latter are produced by structural relaxation using a fully atomistic model. This relaxation turns out to be crucially important for electronic properties. We describe experimentally observed features such as additional Dirac points and the "Hofstadter butterfly" structure of energy levels in a magnetic field. We find that the electronic structure is sensitive to many-body renormalization of the local energy gap.