No Arabic abstract
Twisted van der Waals bilayers provide an ideal platform to study the electron correlation in solids. Of particular interest is the 30 degree twisted bilayer honeycomb lattice system, which possesses an incommensurate moire pattern and uncommon electronic behaviors may appear due to the absence of phase coherence. Such system is extremely sensitive to further twist and many intriguing phenomena will occur. In this work, based on first-principles calculations we show that, for further twist near 30 degree, there could induce dramatically different dielectric behaviors of electron between left and right twisted cases. Specifically, it is found that the left and right twists show suppressed and amplified dielectric response under vertical electric field, respectively. Further analysis demonstrate that such exotic dielectric property can be attributed to the stacking dependent charge redistribution due to twist, which forms twist-dependent pseudospin textures. We will show that such pseudospin textures are robust under small electric field. As a result, for the right twisted case, there is almost no electric dipole formation exceeding the monolayer thickness when the electric field is applied. Whereas for the left case, the system could even demonstrate negative susceptibility, i.e. the induced polarization is opposite to the applied field, which is very rare in the nature. Such findings not only enrich our understanding on moire systems but also open an appealing route toward functional 2D materials design for electronic, optical and even energy storage devices.
The interlayer van der Waals interaction in twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) induces both in-plane and out-of-plane atomic displacements showing complex patterns that depend on the twist angle. In particular, for small twist angles, within each graphene layer, the relaxations give rise to a vortex-like displacement pattern which is known to affect the dispersion of the flat bands. Here, we focus on yet another structural property, the chirality of the twisted bilayer. We perform first-principles calculations based on density functional theory to investigate the properties induced by twist chirality in both real and momentum space. In real space, we study the interplay between twist chirality and atomic relaxation patterns. In momentum space, we investigate the spin textures around the $K$ points of the Brillouin zone, showing that alternating vortex-like textures are correlated with the chirality of tBLG. Interestingly, the helicity of each vortex is inverted by changing the chirality while the different twist angles also modify the spin textures. We discuss the origin of the spin textures by calculating the layer weights and using plot regression models.
We consider the influence of a spin accumulation in a normal metal on the magnetic statics and dynamics in an adjacent magnetic insulator. In particular, we focus on arbitary angles between the spin accumulation and the easy-axis of the magnetic insulator. Based on Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert phenomenology supplemented with magnetoelectronic circuit theory, we find that the magnetic texture twists into a stable configuration that turns out to be described by a virtual, or image, domain wall configuration, i.e., a domain wall outside the ferromagnet. We show that even when the spin accumulation is perpendicular to the anisotropy axis, the magnetic texture develops a component parallel to the spin accumulation for sufficiently large spin bias. The emergence of this parallel component gives rise to threshold behavior in the spin Hall magnetoresistance and nonlocal magnon transport. This threshold can be used to design novel spintronic and magnonic devices that can be operated without external magnetic fields.
Using density-functional theory, we calculate the electronic bandstructure of single-layer graphene on top of hexagonal In_2Te_2 monolayers. The geometric configuration with In and Te atoms at centers of carbon hexagons leads to a Kekule texture with an ensuing bandgap of 20 meV. The alternative structure, nearly degenerate in energy, with the In and Te atoms on top of carbon sites is characterized instead by gapless spectrum with the original Dirac cones of graphene reshaped, depending on the graphene-indium chalcogenide distance, either in the form of an undoubled pseudo-spin one Dirac cone or in a quadratic band crossing point at the Fermi level. These electronic phases harbor charge fractionalization and topological Mott insulating states of matter.
We investigate the interplay of magnetic fluctuations and Cooper pairing in twisted bilayer graphene from a purely microscopic model within a large-scale tight-binding approach resolving the AA ngstrom scale. For local onsite repulsive interactions and using the random-phase approximation for spin fluctuations, we derive a microscopic effective pairing interaction that we use for self-consistent solutions of the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes equations of superconductivity. We study the predominant pairing types as function of interaction strength, temperature and band filling. For large regions of this parameter space, we find chiral $d$-wave pairing regimes, spontaneously breaking time-reversal symmetry, separated by magnetic instabilities at integer band fillings. Interestingly, the $d$-wave pairing is strongly concentrated in the AA regions of the moire unit cell and exhibits phase windings of integer multiples of $2pi$ around these superconducting islands, i.e. pinned vortices. The spontaneous circulating current creates a distinctive magnetic field pattern. This signature of the chiral pairing should be measurable by state-of-the-art experimental techniques.
Twisted double bilayer graphene has recently emerged as an interesting moire material that exhibits strong correlation phenomena that are tunable by an applied electric field. Here we study the atomic and electronic properties of three different graphene double bilayers: double bilayers composed of two AB stacked bilayers (AB/AB), double bilayers composed of two AA stacked bilayers (AA/AA) as well as heterosystems composed of one AB and one AA bilayer (AB/AA). The atomic structure is determined using classical force fields. We find that the inner layers of the double bilayer exhibit significant in-plane and out-of-plane relaxations, similar to twisted bilayer graphene. The relaxations of the outer layers depend on the stacking: atoms in AB bilayers follow the relaxations of the inner layers, while atoms in AA bilayers attempt to avoid higher-energy AA stacking. For the relaxed structures, we calculate the electronic band structures using the tight-binding method. All double bilayers exhibit flat bands at small twist angles, but the shape of the bands depends sensitively on the stacking of the outer layers. To gain further insight, we study the evolution of the band structure as the outer layers are rigidly moved away from the inner layers, while preserving their atomic relaxations. This reveals that the hybridization with the outer layers results in an additional flattening of the inner-layer flat band manifold. Our results establish AA/AA and AB/AA twisted double bilayers as interesting moire materials with different flat band physics compared to the widely studied AB/AB system.