Two-Body Solution and Instabilities along Streda Lines in Moire Flat Bands

TL;DR

This paper explores the effects of magnetic fields on moire flat bands modeled as Landau levels, revealing stable Chern-insulating states, phase transitions near charge neutrality, and a new basis for two-body problems with unequal magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel center-of-charge basis for two-body problems in Landau levels with unequal magnetic fields and analyzes the stability of topological states under magnetic perturbations.

Findings

Chern-insulating states are robust away from charge neutrality.

Transition from incompressible to compressible phase occurs near charge neutrality.

Pseudopotentials exhibit non-monotonic behavior with magnetic field differences.

Abstract

Moire minibands in twisted homobilayer semiconductors can, under suitable approximations, be modeled as a pair of Landau levels with opposite Chern numbers. This provides a minimal model for searching novel topological states in a time-reversal-symmetric Hamiltonian. In this work, we investigate the effects of an external magnetic field in this model. We study the many-body ground state in the density-magnetic-field (n-B) plane along the dn/dB = \pm1/Phi0 Streda line with Hartree-Fock approximation. Away from charge neutrality, we find the Chern-insulating (incompressible) state is very robust while towards charge neutrality, we find a transition from incompressible phase to compressible phase as the interaction strength kappa decreases. Using time-dependent mean-field theory, we further analyze spin-flip excitations and find that the incompressible state along Streda line toward charge neutrality becomes unstable even at large kappa when magnetic field is sufficiently large. Finally, we solve the two-body problem in a given Landau level exactly where the two particles experience unequal magnetic fields using a new basis called center-of-charge basis. This basis allows any isotropic interaction to be parameterized by a single quantum number, the relative angular momentum, thereby extending the Haldane pseudopotentials to the unequal-magnetic-fields case. As the difference of the two magnetic fields varies, these pseudopotentials show a sequence of level crossings, leading to non-monotonic structure of pseudopotentials that is absent in ordinary Landau level systems. Our formulation provides a useful starting point for studying weak-field physics in moire flat bands, where magnetic Bloch-state basis becomes computationally impossible due to the large basis sizes.