Realization of nearly dispersionless bands with strong orbital anisotropy from destructive interference in twisted bilayer MoS<sub>2</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34561454.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-25922-8 and PMC identifier 8463715.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Recently, the twist angle between adjacent sheets of stacked van der Waals materials emerged as a new knob to engineer correlated states of matter in two-dimensional heterostructures in a controlled manner, giving rise to emergent phenomena such as superconductivity or correlated insulating states. Here, we use an ab initio based approach to characterize the electronic properties of twisted bilayer MoS<sub>2</sub>. We report that, in marked contrast to twisted bilayer graphene, slightly hole-doped MoS<sub>2</sub> realizes a strongly asymmetric p<sub>x</sub>-p<sub>y</sub> Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice, with two almost entirely dispersionless bands emerging due to destructive interference. The origin of these dispersionless bands, is similar to that of the flat bands in the prototypical Lieb or Kagome lattices and co-exists with the general band flattening at small twist angle due to the moiré interference. We study the collective behavior of twisted bilayer MoS<sub>2</sub> in the presence of interactions, and characterize an array of different magnetic and orbitally-ordered correlated phases, which may be susceptible to quantum fluctuations giving rise to exotic, purely quantum, states of matter.