Simulating twistronics without a twist

Abstract

Rotational misalignment or twisting of two mono-layers of graphene strongly influences its electronic properties. Structurally, twisting leads to large periodic supercell structures, which in turn can support intriguing strongly correlated behaviour. Here, we propose a highly tunable scheme to synthetically emulate twisted bilayer systems with ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice. In our scheme, neither a physical bilayer nor twist is directly realized. Instead, two synthetic layers are produced exploiting coherently-coupled internal atomic states, and a supercell structure is generated \emph{via} a spatially-dependent Raman coupling. To illustrate this concept, we focus on a synthetic square bilayer lattice and show that it leads to tunable quasi-flatbands and Dirac cone spectra under certain magic supercell periodicities. The appearance of these features are explained using a perturbative analysis. Our proposal can be implemented using available state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and opens the route towards the controlled study of strongly-correlated flat band accompanied by hybridization physics akin to magic angle bilayer graphene in cold atom quantum simulators.