Extended Fractional Chern Insulators Near Half Flux in Twisted Bilayer Graphene Above the Magic Angle

Invited-In-person  · Invited

Abstract

When a Chern band is partially filled, a fractional Chern insulator (FCI)---the lattice analog of a fractional quantum Hall state---can arise. Though the full range of possible scenarios for producing such a state is not established, the most tractable models combine strong electronic interactions with the quantum geometry of the parent Chern band meeting specific criteria. In twisted bilayer graphene, the importance of interactions can be tuned by varying the interlayer twist. Here, we study a sample with twist $\sim 1.4$\textdegree, large enough to suppress the zero-field correlated states. We find that applying a strong magnetic field restores the importance of electron-electron interactions: at nearly half a magnetic flux quantum per moir\'e unit cell, deep in the Hofstadter regime, odd-denominator FCIs appear in multiple Hofstadter subbands. These fractional states persist over larger ranges of density, and are more robustly quantized, than nearby integer states, opposite to what is seen in other fractional quantum Hall or FCI systems.

Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12819

Presenters

  • Aaron Sharpe

    • Stanford University

Authors

  • Aaron Sharpe

    • Stanford University
  • Joe Finney

    • Stanford Univ
  • Linsey Rodenbach

    • NVIDIA
  • Jian Kang

    • Soochow Univ
  • Xiaoyu Wang

    • National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
  • Kenji Watanabe

    • National Institute for Materials Science
  • Takashi Taniguchi

    • National Institute for Materials Science
  • Marc Kastner

    • Stanford University
  • Oskar Vafek

    • University of Minnesota Twin Cities
  • David Goldhaber-Gordon

    • Stanford University