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Interacting valley Chern insulator and its topological imprint on moiré superconductors

Cornell Affiliated Author(s)

Author

Xiao-Chuan Wu
Yichen Xu
Chao-Ming Jian
Cenke Xu

Abstract

One salient feature of systems with moiré superlattice is that the Chern number of "minibands" originating from each valley of the original graphene Brillouin zone becomes a well-defined quantized number because the miniband from each valley can be isolated from the rest of the spectrum due to the moiré potential. Then a moiré system with a well-defined valley Chern number can become a nonchiral topological insulator with U(1)×Z3 symmetry and a Z classification at the free fermion level. Here we demonstrate that the strongly interacting nature of the moiré system reduces the classification of the valley Chern insulator from Z to Z3, and it is topologically equivalent to a bosonic symmetry-protected topological state made of local boson operators. We also demonstrate that even if the system becomes a superconductor when doped away from the valley Chern insulator, the valley Chern insulator still leaves a topological imprint as the localized Majorana fermion zero mode in certain geometric configuration. © 2019 American Physical Society.

Date Published

Journal

Physical Review B

Volume

100

Issue

15

URL

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85074430162&doi=10.1103%2fPhysRevB.100.155138&partnerID=40&md5=b53bafa5faccc8bd48cba4466f531796

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevB.100.155138

Group (Lab)

Chao-Ming Jian Group

Funding Source

1920434
GBMF4304
DMR-1920434

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