Collective excitations of the Chern-insulator states in commensurate double moir\'{e} superlattices of twisted bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

TL;DR

This paper investigates the collective excitations in Chern insulator states of twisted bilayer graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride, revealing how electron interactions and symmetry breaking influence exciton and valley-wave modes at various twist angles.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of collective excitation modes in TBG/BN Chern insulators, highlighting the effects of electron interactions, symmetry breaking, and twist angle variations on exciton and valley-wave spectra.

Findings

Higher intra-flavor band gaps in TBG/BN lead to elevated exciton energies (~20 meV).

Inter-flavor valley-wave modes in TBG/BN are significantly higher in energy (>2.5 meV) than in TBG.

Excitation spectra differ notably between positive and negative filling factors in TBG/BN.

Abstract

We study the collective excitation modes of the Chern insulator states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride (TBG/BN) at odd integer fillings ($\nu$) of the flat bands. For the $1 \times 1$ commensurate double moir\'{e} superlattices in TBG/BN at three twist angles ($\theta'$) between BN and graphene, self-consistent Hartree-Fock calculations show that the electron-electron interaction and the broken $C_{2z}$ symmetry lead to the Chern-insulator ground states with valley-spin flavor polarized HF bands at odd $\nu$. In the active-band approximation, the HF bands in the same flavor of TBG/BN are much more separated than those of the pristine TBG with TBG/BN having a larger intra-flavor band gap so that the energies of the lowest intra-flavor exciton modes of TBG/BN computed within the time-dependent HF method are much higher than those of TBG and reach about 20 meV, and the exciton wavefunctions of TBG/BN become less localized than those of TBG. The inter-flavor valley-wave modes in TBG/BN have excitation energies higher than 2.5 meV which is also much larger than that of TBG, while the spin-wave modes all have zero excitation gap. In contrast to TBG with particle-hole symmetric excitation modes for positive and negative $\nu$, the excitation spectrums and gaps of TBG/BN at positive $\nu$ are rather different from those at negative $\nu$. The quantitative behavior of the excitation spectrum of TBG/BN also varies with $\theta'$. Full HF calculations demonstrate that more HF bands besides the two central bands can have rather large contributions from the single-particle flat-band states, then the lowest exciton modes that determine the optical properties of the Chern insulator states in TBG/BN are generally the ones between the remote and flat-like bands, while the valley-wave modes have similar energies as those in the active-band approximation.