Projected and Solvable Topological Heavy Fermion Model of Twisted Bilayer Graphene

Abstract

We investigate the topological heavy-fermion (THF) model of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) in the projected limit, where only the flat bands are present in the low-energy spectrum. Such limit has been previously analyzed in momentum-space Bistritzer-MacDonald-type continuum models, but not in a real-space formalism. In this regime, the Hubbard interaction ($U_1$) of the $f$-electrons is larger than the bandwidth ($2M$) of the flat bands but smaller than the gap ($\gamma$) between the flat and remote bands. In the THF model, concentrated charge (in real space) and concentrated Berry curvature (in momentum space) are respectively realized by exponentially localized $f$-orbitals and itinerant Dirac $c$-electrons. Local moments naturally arise from $f$-orbitals. Hybridizing the $f$-electrons with $c$-electrons produces power-law tails of the flat-band Wannier functions, raising the question of relevance of the local moment picture in the projected $U_1\ll \gamma$ limit. Nonetheless, we find that the local moments remain stable as long as $U_1 \gg \Delta(\omega)$ for $|\omega|\lesssim U_1$, where $\Delta(\omega)\sim \gamma^2 N(\omega)$ is the hybridization function seen by each $f$-site, and $N(\omega)$ is the density of states of the Dirac $c$-bands. Notably, the comparison between $U_1$ and $\gamma$ is irrelevant to the local moment formation if $N(\omega)$ is unknown. Within the framework of THF, we also derive the correlated self-energy of the flat bands using the Hubbard-I approximation and estimate the coupling strength between the local moments. Finally, we comment that, in the regime of extremely concentrated Berry curvature, the single-particle gap between flat bands and remote bands vanishes and the interaction is always larger than the gap.