Electronic spectral properties of incommensurate twisted trilayer graphene

TL;DR

This paper introduces a momentum space formalism for modeling incommensurate multilayered van der Waals structures, specifically applied to twisted trilayer graphene, revealing complex interlayer coupling effects on spectral properties.

Contribution

It develops a novel tight-binding, momentum space approach for incommensurate multilayer structures, extending previous bilayer models to trilayer graphene.

Findings

Interlayer coupling significantly affects low energy spectral properties.

The formalism can model angle-resolved photoemission and tunnelling spectroscopy.

Coupling effects cannot be reduced to pairwise interactions.

Abstract

Multilayered van der Waals structures often lack periodicity, which difficults their modeling. Building on previous work for bilayers, we develop a tight-binding based, momentum space formalism capable of describing incommensurate multilayered van der Waals structures for arbitrary lattice mismatch and/or misalignment between different layers. We demonstrate how the developed formalism can be used to model angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements, and scanning tunnelling spectroscopy which can probe the local and total density of states. The general method is then applied to incommensurate twisted trilayer graphene structures. It is found that the coupling between the three layers can significantly affect the low energy spectral properties, which cannot be simply attributed to the pairwise hybridization between the layers.