Floquet-engineered topological flat bands in irradiated twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

We propose a tunable optical setup to engineer topologically nontrivial flat bands in twisted bilayer graphene under circularly polarized light. Using both analytical and numerical calculations, we demonstrate that nearly flat bands can be engineered at small twist angles near the magic angles of the static system. The flatness and the gaps between these bands can be tuned optically by varying laser frequency and amplitude. We study the effects of interlayer hopping variations on Floquet flat bands and find that changes associated with lattice relaxation favor their formation. Furthermore, we find that, once formed, the flat bands carry nonzero Chern numbers. We show that at currently known values of parameters, such topological flat bands can be realized using circularly polarized UV laser light. Thus, our work opens the way to creating optically tunable, strongly correlated topological phases of electrons in moiré superlattices.