Moiré flat bands of twisted few-layer graphite

Abstract

We report that the twisted few layer graphite (tFL-graphite) is a new family of moiré heterostructures (MHSs), which has richer and highly tunable moiré flat band structures entirely distinct from all the known MHSs. A tFL-graphite is composed of two few-layer graphite (Bernal stacked multilayer graphene), which are stacked on each other with a small twisted angle. The moiré band structure of the tFL-graphite strongly depends on the layer number of its composed two van der Waals layers. Near the magic angle, a tFL-graphite always has two nearly flat bands coexisting with a few pairs of narrowed dispersive (parabolic or linear) bands at the Fermi level, thus, enhances the DOS at E_F . This coexistence property may also enhance the possible superconductivity as been demonstrated in other multiband superconductivity systems. Therefore, we expect strong multiband correlation effects in tFL-graphite. Meanwhile, a proper perpendicular electric field can induce several isolated nearly flat bands with nonzero valley Chern number in some simple tFL-graphites, indicating that tFL-graphite is also a novel topological flat band system.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

few-layer graphite / flat band / moiré heterostructures

References

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Note added

The first draft of the article [arXiv: 2001.07995] was online in 2020. Subsequently, several works also study similar systems using various methods, and the results were consistent with ours [78–81].

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary materials are available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1220-z and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-022-1220-z and are accessible for authorized users.

Acknowledgements

We thank Jinhua Sun for helpful discussion.This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11874160, 12141401, and 11534001), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFA0403501), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST: 2017KFYXJJ027).

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