Electron spin resonance and collective excitations in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

In a strongly correlated system, collective excitations contain key information regarding the electronic order of the underlying ground state. An abundance of collective modes in the spin and valley isospin channels of magic-angle graphene moir\'e bands has been alluded to by a series of recent experiments. However, direct observation of collective excitations has remained elusive due to the lack of a spin probe. In this work, we use a resistively-detected electron spin resonance technique to look for low-energy collective excitations in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene. We report direct observation of collective modes in the form of microwave-induced resonance near half filling of the moir\'e flatbands. The frequency-magnetic field dependence of these resonance modes sheds light onto the nature of intervalley spin coupling, allowing us to extract parameters such as intervalley exchange interaction and spin stiffness. Two independent observations testify that the generation and detection of the microwave resonance relies on the strong correlation within the flat moir\'e energy band. First, the onset of robust resonance response coincides with the spontaneous flavor polarization at half moir\'e filling, and remains absent in the density range where the underlying Fermi surface is isospin unpolarized. Second, we performed the same resonance measurement on graphene monolayer and bilayer samples, including twisted bilayer with a large twist angle, where flatband physics is absent. We observe no indication of resonance response in these samples across a large range of carrier density, microwave frequency and power. A natural explanation is that the resonance response near the magic angle originates from "Dirac revivals" and the resulting isospin order.