Higher Landau-Level Analogs and Signatures of Non-Abelian States in Twisted Bilayer MoTe$_2$ (2404.05697v2)

Abstract: Recent experimental discovery of fractional Chern insulators at zero magnetic field in moir\'e superlattices has sparked intense interests in bringing Landau level physics to flat Chern bands. In twisted MoTe$_2$ bilayers (tMoTe$_2$), recent theoretical and experimental studies have found three consecutive flat Chern bands at twist angle $\sim 2^\circ$. In this work, we investigate whether higher Landau level physics can be found in these consecutive Chern bands. At twist angles $2.00^\circ$ and $1.89^\circ$, we identify four consecutive $C = 1$ bands for the $K$ valley in tMoTe$_2$. By constructing Wannier functions directly from density functional theory (DFT) calculations, a six-orbital model is developed to describe the consecutive Chern bands, with the orbitals forming a honeycomb lattice. Exact diagonalization on top of Hartree-Fock calculations are carried out with the Wannier functions. Especially, when the second moir\'e miniband is half-filled, signatures of non-Abelian states are found. Our Wannier-based approach in modelling moir\'e superlattices is faithful to DFT wave functions and can serve as benchmarks for continuum models. The possibility of realizing non-Abelian anyons at zero magnetic field also opens up a new pathway for fault-tolerant quantum information processing.