Topological flat bands in rhombohedral tetralayer and multilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride moire superlattices

Abstract

We show that rhombohedral four-layer graphene (4LG) nearly aligned with a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) substrate often develops nearly flat isolated low energy bands with non-zero valley Chern numbers. The bandwidths of the isolated flatbands are controllable through an electric field and twist angle, becoming as narrow as $\sim10~$meV for interlayer potential differences between top and bottom layers of $|\Delta|\approx 10\sim15~$meV and $\theta \sim 0.5^{\circ}$ at the graphene and boron nitride interface. The local density of states (LDOS) analysis shows that the nearly flat band states are associated to the non-dimer low energy sublattice sites at the top or bottom graphene layers and their degree of localization in the moire superlattice is strongly gate tunable, exhibiting at times large delocalization despite of the narrow bandwidth. We verified that the first valence bands' valley Chern numbers are $C^{\nu=\pm1}_{V1} = \pm n$, proportional to layer number for $n$LG/BN systems up to $n = 8$ rhombohedral multilayers.