Attractive electron-electron interactions from internal screening in magic angle twisted bilayer graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates how internal screening in twisted bilayer graphene near the magic angle enhances electron-electron interactions, leading to attractive regions that may explain observed correlated phenomena like superconductivity.

Contribution

It introduces a twist-angle dependent model of internal screening effects in tBLG, revealing the emergence of attractive interactions and their implications for correlated states.

Findings

Dielectric response sharply increases near the magic angle.

Screened interactions exhibit attractive regions at certain twist angles.

Hubbard parameters are strongly reduced and non-linearly dependent on twist angle.

Abstract

Twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) has recently emerged as a new platform for studying electron correlations, the strength of which can be controlled via the twist angle. Here, we study the effect of internal screening on electron-electron interactions in undoped tBLG. Using the random phase approximation, we find that the dielectric response of tBLG drastically increases near the magic angle and is highly twist-angle dependent. As a consequence of the abrupt change of the Fermi velocity as a function of wave vector, the screened interaction in real space exhibits attractive regions for certain twist angles near the magic angle. Attractive interactions can induce charge density waves and superconductivity and therefore our findings could be relevant to understand the microscopic origins of the recently observed strong correlation phenomena in undoped tBLG. The resulting screened Hubbard parameters are strongly reduced and exhibit a non-linear dependence on the twist angle. We also carry out calculations with the constrained random phase approximation and parametrize a twist-angle dependent Keldysh model for the resulting effective interaction.