Twisted Bilayer Graphene V: Exact Analytic Many-Body Excitations in Twisted Bilayer Graphene Coulomb Hamiltonians: Charge Gap, Goldstone Modes and Absence of Cooper Pairing

TL;DR

This paper provides exact analytic solutions for many-body excitations in twisted bilayer graphene Coulomb models, showing the absence of Coulomb-driven Cooper pairing and suggesting phonons or kinetic energy are necessary for superconductivity.

Contribution

It derives exact expressions for excitation energies and wavefunctions in TBG Coulomb models, revealing no Coulomb-induced Cooper pairing at the magic angle.

Findings

Charge excitation energy is a convolution of Coulomb potential and quantum geometric tensor.

Neutral excitations are magnons with analytically calculated dispersion.

Coulomb interactions do not produce Cooper pairs at the magic angle.

Abstract

We find exact analytic expressions for the energies and wavefunctions of the charged and neutral excitations above the exact ground states (at rational filling per unit cell) of projected Coulomb Hamiltonians in twisted bilayer graphene. Our exact expressions are valid for any form of the Coulomb interaction and any form of $AA$ and $AB/BA$ tunneling. The single charge excitation energy is a convolution of the Coulomb potential with a quantum geometric tensor of the TBG bands. The neutral excitations are (high-symmetry group) magnons, and their dispersion is analytically calculated in terms of the form factors of the active bands in TBG. The two-charge excitation energy and wavefunctions are also obtained, and a sufficient condition on the graphene eigenstates for obtaining a Cooper-pair from Coulomb interactions is obtained. For the actual TBG bands at the first magic angle, we can analytically show that the Cooper pair binding energy is zero in all such projected Coulomb models, implying that either phonons and/or non-zero kinetic energy are needed for superconductivity. Since the [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 246401] showed that the kinetic energy bounds on the superexchange energy are less $10^{-3}$ in Coulomb units, the phonon mechanism becomes then very likely. If nonetheless the superconductivity is due to kinetic terms which render the bands non-flat, one prediction of our theory is that the highest $T_c$ would not occur at the highest DOS.