Superconductivity, correlated insulators, and Wess-Zumino-Witten terms in twisted bilayer graphene.

ABSTRACT: Recent experiments on twisted bilayer graphene have shown a high-temperature parent state with massless Dirac fermions and broken electronic flavor symmetry; superconductivity and correlated insulators emerge from this parent state at lower temperatures. We propose that the superconducting and correlated insulating orders are connected by Wess-Zumino-Witten terms, so that defects of one order contain quanta of another order and skyrmion fluctuations of the correlated insulator are a "mechanism" for superconductivity. We present a comprehensive listing of plausible low-temperature orders and the parent flavor symmetry-breaking orders. The previously characterized topological nature of the band structure of twisted bilayer graphene plays an important role in this analysis.

SUBMITTER: Christos M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7703554 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature