Absence of small magic angles for disordered tunneling potentials in twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

We consider small random perturbations of the standard high-symmetry tunneling potentials in the Bistritzer-MacDonald Hamiltonian describing twisted bilayer graphene. Using methods developed by Sj\"ostrand for studying the spectral asymptotics of non-selfadjoint pseudo-differential operators, we prove that for sufficiently small twisting angles the Hamiltonian will not exhibit a flat band with overwhelming probability, and hence the absence of the so-called \textit{magic angels}. Moreover, we prove a probabilistic Weyl law for the eigenvalues of the non-selfadjoint tunneling operator, subject to small random perturbations, of the Bistritzer-MacDonald Hamiltonian in the chiral limit.