The effects of the long range electrostatic interaction in twisted bilayer graphene are described using the Hartree-Fock approximation. The results show a significant dependence of the band widths and shapes on electron filling, and the existence of
broken symmetry phases at many densities, either valley/spin polarized, with broken sublattice symmetry, or both.
We study the manipulation of Majorana zero modes in a thin disk made from a $p$-wave superconductor, in order to understand their use as a building block for topological quantum computers. We analyze the second-order topological corner modes that ari
se when an in-plane magnetic field is applied, and calculate their dynamical evolution when rotating the magnetic field, with special emphasis on non-adiabatic effects. We characterize the phase transition between high-frequency and near-adiabatic evolution using Floquet analysis. We show that oscillations persist even in the adiabatic phase because of a frequency dependent coupling between zero modes and excited states, which we have quantified numerically and analytically. These results show that controlling the rotation frequency can be a simple method to avoid the non-adiabatic errors originated from this coupling and thus increase the robustness of topological quantum computation.
We study the effect of twisting on bilayer graphene. The effect of lattice relaxation is included; we look at the electronic structure, piezo-electric charges and spontaneous polarisation. We show that the electronic structure without lattice relaxat
ion shows a set of extremely flat in-gap states similar to Landau-levels, where the spacing scales with twist angle. With lattice relaxation we still have flat bands, but now the spectrum becomes independent of twist angle for sufficiently small angles. We describe in detail the nature of the bands, and study appropriate continuum models, at the same time explaining the spectrum We find that even though the spectra for both parallel an anti-parallel alignment are very similar, the spontaneous polarisation effects only occur for parallel alignment. We argue that this suggests a large interlayer hopping between boron and nitrogen.
We generalize the continuum model for Moire structures made from twisted graphene layers, in order to include lattice relaxation and the formation of channels at very small (marginal) twist angles. We show that a precise description of the electronic
structure at such small angles can be achieved by i) calculating first the relaxed atomic structure, ii) projecting the interlayer electronic hopping parameters using a suitable basis of Bloch states, and iii) increasing the number of harmonics in the continuum approximation to interlayer hopping. The results show a complex structure of quasi one dimensional states when a finite bias is applied.
The emergence of flat bands in twisted bilayer graphene leads to an enhancement of interaction effects, and thus to insulating and superconducting phases at low temperatures, even though the exact mechanism is still widely debated. The position and s
plitting of the flat bands is also very sensitive to the residual interactions. Moreover, the low energy bands of twisted graphene bilayers show a rich structure of singularities in the density of states, van Hove singularities, which can enhance further the role of interactions. We study the effect of the long-range interactions on the band structure and the van Hove singularities of the low energy bands of twisted graphene bilayers. Reasonable values of the long-range electrostatic interaction lead to a band dispersion with a significant dependence on the filling. The change of the shape and position of the bands with electronic filling implies that the van Hove singularities remain close to the Fermi energy for a broad range of fillings. This result can be described as an effective pinning of the Fermi energy at the singularity. The sensitivity of the band structure to screening by the environment may open new ways of manipulating the system.
We analyze the effect of twists on the electronic structure of configurations of infinite stacks of graphene layers. We focus on three different cases: an infinite stack where each layer is rotated with respect to the previous one by a fixed angle, t
wo pieces of semi-infinite graphite rotated with respect to each other, and finally a single layer of graphene rotated with respect to a graphite surface. In all three cases we find a rich structure, with sharp resonances and flat bands for small twist angles. The method used can be easily generalized to more complex arrangements and stacking sequences.
