Abstract
Flat-band systems are a promising platform for realizing exotic collective ground states with spontaneously broken symmetry because the electron-electron interactions dominate over the kinetic energy. A collective ground state of particular interest is the chased-after exciton condensate (EC). However, in flat-band systems other collective ground states can compete with an EC phase, and the conventional treatment of the effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations predicts the EC phase should be unstable. Here, using double-twisted bilayer graphene (TBLG) heterostructures as an example, we show that, for realistic interaction strengths, the EC phase is favored with respect to other TBLG's phases - orbital magnetism and superconductivity - when the TBLGs have opposite doping, and that the quantum metric of the Bloch wave functions stabilizes the EC, reversing the conclusion that would be drawn from the conventional approach in which quantum metric contributions are neglected. Our results suggest that the quantum metric plays a critical role in determining the stability of exciton condensates in double layers formed by systems with flat bands.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | L140506 |
| Journal | Physical Review B |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue number | 14 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2022 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Funding
X.H. and E.R. acknowledge support from ARO (Grant No. W911NF-18-1-0290) and NSF (Grant No. DMR- 1455233). E.R. also thanks the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1607611, and KITP, supported by Grant No. NSF PHY1748958, where part of this work was performed. X.H. acknowledges the hospitality of Hunan Normal University. The authors acknowledge William & Mary Research Computing for providing computational resources. Part of the calculations were performed on the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Stampede2 at TACC through allocation TG-PHY210052. The research was partially supported by the Foundation for Polish Science through the IRA Programme cofinanced by the EU within SG OP.
