Disorder-Induced Delocalization in Magic-Angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene

Pedro Alcázar Guerrero, Viet-Hung Nguyen, Jorge Martínez Romeral, Aron W. Cummings, José-Hugo Garcia, Jean-Christophe Charlier, Stephan Roche

Published 2024-01-16, updated 2024-12-17Version 3

Flat bands in moir\'e systems are exciting new playgrounds for the generation and study of exotic many-body physics phenomena in low-dimensional materials. Such physics is attributed to the vanishing kinetic energy and strong spatial localization of the flat-band states. Here we use numerical simulations to examine the electronic transport properties of such flat bands in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene in the presence of disorder. We find that while a conventional downscaling of the mean free path with increasing disorder strength occurs at higher energies, in the flat bands the mean free path can actually increase with increasing disorder strength.This phenomenon is also captured by the disorder-dependent quantum metric, which is directly linked to the ground state localization.This disorder-induced delocalization suggests that weak disorder may have a strong impact on the exotic physics of magic-angle bilayer graphene and other related moir\'e systems.