Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) exhibits a panoply of many-body phenomena that are intimately tied to the appearance of narrow and well-isolated electronic bands. The microscopic ingredients that are responsible for the complex experimental phenomenology include electron–electron (phonon) interactions and nontrivial Bloch wavefunctions associated with the narrow bands. Inspired by recent experiments, we focus on two independent quantities that are considerably modified by Coulomb interaction-driven band renormalization, namely the density of states and the minimal spatial extent associated with the Wannier functions. First, we show that a filling-dependent enhancement of the density of states, caused by band flattening, in combination with phonon-mediated attraction due to electron-phonon umklapp processes, increases the tendency towards superconducting pairing in a range of angles around magic-angle. Second, we demonstrate that the minimal spatial extent associated with the Wannier functions, which contributes towards increasing the superconducting phase stiffness, also develops a nontrivial enhancement due to the interaction-induced renormalization of the Bloch wavefunctions. While our modeling of superconductivity (SC) assumes a weak electron-phonon coupling and does not consider many of the likely relevant correlation effects, it explains simply the experimentally observed robustness of SC in the wide range of angles that occurs in the relevant range of fillings.
We argue that the unusually strong electron–electron interactions in the narrow bands in moiré superlattices originate from compact Wannier orbitals. Enhanced overlaps of electronic wavefunctions, enabled by such orbitals, result in a strong el–el superlattice umklapp scattering. We identify the umklapp scattering processes as a source of the strong temperature-dependent resistivity observed in these systems. In a simple model, the umklapp scattering predicts a
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10366925
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- New Journal of Physics
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1367-2630
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 052001
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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