Dynamic Kohn anomaly in twisted bilayer graphene

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamic Kohn anomaly in twisted bilayer graphene, revealing how it depends on twist angle, temperature, and doping, and highlighting its disappearance at the magic angle.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a novel dynamic Kohn anomaly in TBG caused by Moire Dirac point nesting and explores its dependence on various parameters.

Findings

Kohn anomaly occurs due to nesting of Moire Dirac points.

Anomaly features vary with twist angle, disappearing at the magic angle.

Finite temperature and doping influence the anomaly's characteristics.

Abstract

Twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) has attracted great interest in the last decade due to the novel properties it exhibited. It was revealed that e-phonon interaction plays an important role in a variety of phenomena in this system, such as superconductivity and exotic phases. However, due to its complexity, the e-phonon interaction in TBG is not well studied yet. In this work, we study the electron interaction with the acoustic phonon mode in twisted bilayer graphene and one of its consequences, i.e., the Kohn anomaly. The Kohn anomaly in ordinary metals usually happens at phonon momentum q = 2kF as a dramatic modification of the phonon frequency when the phonon wave vector nests the electron Fermi surface. However, novel Kohn anomaly can happen in topological semimetals, such as graphene and Weyl semimetals. In this work, we show that the novel dynamic Kohn anomaly can also take place in twisted bilayer graphene due to the nesting of two different Moire Dirac points by the phonon wave vector. Moreover, by tuning the twist angle, the dynamic Kohn anomaly in TBG shows different features. Particularly, at magic angle when the electron bandwidth is almost flat, the dynamic Kohn anomalies of acoustic phonons disappear. We also studied the effects of finite temperature and doping on the dynamic Kohn anomaly in TBG and discussed the experimental methods to observe the Kohn anomaly in such system.