Nematic superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

Twisted bilayer graphene displays insulating and superconducting phases caused by exceptional flattening of its lowest energy bands. Superconductivity with highest $T_c$ appears at hole and electron dopings, near half-filling for valence or conduction bands. In the hole-doped case, the data show that three-fold lattice rotation symmetry is broken in the superconducting phase, i.e., a superconductor is also a nematic. We present the mechanism for nematic superconductivity. We take as an input the fact that at relevant dopings the Fermi energy lies in the vicinity of twist-induced Van Hove singularities in the density of states and argue that the low-energy physics can be properly described by patch models with six Van Hove points for electron doping and twelve Van Hove points for hole doping. We obtain pairing interactions for the patch models in terms of parameters of the microscopic model for the flat bands, which contains both local and twist-induced non-local interactions and show that the latter gives rise to attraction in different superconducting channels. For hole-doping, we find two attractive channels, $g$ and $i$-waves, with almost equal coupling constants. We show that in the co-existence state, where both order parameters are non-zero, the three-fold lattice rotation symmetry is broken, i.e., a superconductor is also a nematic. We find two possible nematic states, one is time-reversal symmetric, the other additionally breaks time-reversal symmetry. Our scenario for nematic superconductivity is based on generic symmetry considerations, and we expect it to be applicable also to other systems with two (or more) attractive channels with similar couplings.