We study the electronic structure of two Dirac electron gazes coupled by a periodic Hamiltonian such as it appears in rotated graphene bilayers. Ab initio and tight-binding approaches are combined and show that the spatially periodic coupling between the two Dirac electron gazes can renormalize strongly their velocity. We investigate in particular small angles of rotation and show that the velocity tends to zero in this limit. The localization is confirmed by an analysis of the eigenstates which are localized essentially in the AA zones of the Moiré patterns.
Rotated graphene multilayers form a new class of graphene related systems
with electronic properties that drastically depend on the rotation angles. It
has been shown that bilayers behave like two isolated graphene planes for large
rotation angles. For smaller angles, states in the Dirac cones belonging to the
two layers interact resulting in the appearance of two van Hove singularities.
States become localised as the rotation angle decreases and the two van Hove
singularities merge into one peak at the Dirac energy. Here we go further and
consider bilayers with very small rotation angles. In this case, well defined
regions of AA stacking exist in the bilayer supercell and we show that states
are confined in these regions for energies in the [-\gamma_t, +\gamma_t] range
with \gamma_t the interplane mean interaction. As a consequence, the local
densities of states show discrete peaks for energies different from the Dirac
energy.Comment: 8 page
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