Electric field-induced spin-valley locking in twisted bilayer buckled honeycomb materials

Abstract

A twisted honeycomb bilayer exhibits a moir\'e superstructure that is composed of a hexagonal arrangement of AB and BA stacked domains separated by domain boundaries. In the case of twisted bilayer graphene, the application of an electric field normal to the bilayer leads to the opening of inverted band gaps in the AB and BA stacked domains. The inverted band gaps result in the formation of a two-dimensional triangular network of counterpropagating valley protected helical domain boundary states, also referred to as the quantum valley Hall effect. Owing to spin-orbit coupling and buckling, the quantum valley Hall effect in twisted bilayer silicene and germanene is more complex than in twisted bilayer graphene. We found that there is a range of electric fields for which the spin degree of freedom is locked to the valley degree of freedom of the electrons in the quantum valley Hall states, resulting in a stronger topological protection. For electric fields smaller than the aforementioned range the twisted bilayer does not exhibit the quantum valley Hall effect, whereas for larger electric fields the spin-valley locking is lifted and the emergent quantum valley Hall states are only valley-protected.