Artificial intelligence for artificial materials: moiré atom

Abstract

Moiré engineering in atomically thin van der Waals heterostructures creates artificial quantum materials with designer properties. We solve the many-body problem of interacting electrons confined to a moiré superlattice potential minimum (the moiré atom) using a 2D fermionic neural network. We show that strong Coulomb interactions in combination with the anisotropic moiré potential lead to striking "Wigner molecule" charge density distributions observable with scanning tunneling microscopy.

Wigner molecular crystals from multielectron moiré artificial atoms

“…Most previous studies have focused on simulating the Fermi-Hubbard model in which intra-atom interactions are described by a single onsite repulsion energy U that neglects the intra-atom degrees of freedom. Recent theoretical studies (12)(13)(14), however, have predicted that multielectron artificial atoms in a moiré superlattice can host quantum states that exhibit unusual charge density distributions owing to a competition between the single-particle energy-level spacing D and the intra-atom Coulomb repulsion energy U (illustrated in Fig. 1A).…”