Kondo Phase in Twisted Bilayer Graphene -- A Unified Theory for Distinct Experiments

Abstract

A number of interesting physical phenomena have been discovered in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG), such as superconductivity, correlated gapped and gapless phases, etc. The gapped phases are believed to be symmetry-breaking states described by mean-field theories, whereas gapless phases exhibit features beyond mean field. This work, combining poor man's scaling, numerical renormalization group, and dynamic mean-field theory, demonstrates that the gapless phases are the heavy Fermi liquid state with some symmetries broken and the others preserved. We adopt the recently proposed topological heavy fermion model for MATBG with effective local orbitals around AA-stacking regions and Dirac fermions surrounding them. At zero temperature and most non-integer fillings, the ground states are found to be heavy Fermi liquids and exhibit Kondo resonance peaks. The Kondo temperature $T_K$ is found at the order of 1meV. A higher temperature than $T_K$ will drive the system into a metallic LM phase where disordered LM's and a Fermi liquid coexist. At integer fillings $\pm1,\pm2$, $T_K$ is suppressed to zero or a value weaker than RKKY interaction, leading to Mott insulators or symmetry-breaking states. This theory offers a unified explanation for several experimental observations, such as zero-energy peaks and quantum-dot-like behaviors in STM, the Pomeranchuk effect, and the saw-tooth feature of inverse compressibility, etc. For future experimental verification, we predict that the Fermi surface in the gapless phase will shrink upon heating - as a characteristic of the heavy Fermi liquid. We also conjecture that the heavy Fermi liquid is the parent state of the observed unconventional superconductivity because the Kondo screening reduces the overwhelming Coulomb interaction (~60meV) to a rather small effective interaction (~1meV) comparable to possible weak attractive interactions.