Hartree--Fock coercivity for twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

We study the minimisers of the Hartree--Fock functional for flat bands in the chiral model of twisted bilayer graphene introduced by Tarnopolsky, Kruchkov, and Vishwanath. Our model is a continuous version of the discrete model considered by Becker, Lin and Stubbs in previous works and the first result is a direct analogue of main theorems of those papers: at half filling of the flat band of multiplicity two, there are exactly two minimisers, obtained by occupying either one of the two sub-bands. (A more general version of this result, stressing its topological origins, was presented in Appendix A.8 of the Lecture Notes by Tao-Zworski.) The new contribution is the strict coercivity of the Hessian of the Hartree--Fock functional at the two minimisers. It is a consequence of the difference between the Chern numbers of the component bands and can be optimistically considered as a soft version of a ``spectral gap''.