Origin of Mott Insulating Behavior and Superconductivity in Twisted Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

A remarkable recent experiment has observed Mott insulator and proximate superconductor phases in twisted bilayer graphene when electrons partly fill a nearly flat miniband that arises a “magic” twist angle. However, the nature of the Mott insulator, the origin of superconductivity, and an effective low-energy model remain to be determined. We propose a Mott insulator with intervalley coherence that spontaneously breaks U(1) valley symmetry and describe a mechanism that selects this order over the competing magnetically ordered states favored by the Hund’s coupling. We also identify symmetry-related features of the nearly flat band that are key to understanding the strong correlation physics and constrain any tight-binding description. First, although the charge density is concentrated on the triangular-lattice sites of the moiré pattern, the Wannier states of the tight-binding model must be centered on different sites which form a honeycomb lattice. Next, spatially localizing electrons derived from the nearly flat band necessarily breaks valley and other symmetries within any mean-field treatment, which is suggestive of a valley-ordered Mott state, and also dictates that additional symmetry breaking is present to remove symmetry-enforced band contacts. Tight-binding models describing the nearly flat miniband are derived, which highlight the importance of further neighbor hopping and interactions. We discuss consequences of this picture for superconducting states obtained on doping the valley-ordered Mott insulator. We show how important features of the experimental phenomenology may be explained and suggest a number of further experiments for the future. We also describe a model for correlated states in trilayer graphene heterostructures and contrast it with the bilayer case.