Motivated by recent experimental studies that have found signatures of a correlated insulator phase and tuning superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene, we study the temperature-dependent conductivity, the spin correlation, and the superconducting pairing correlation within a two-orbital Hubbard model on an emergent honeycomb lattice. The evaluation of the temperature dependence of the conductivity demonstrates that there is a metal-insulator transition and the Mott phase at strong coupling is accompanied by antiferromagnetic order. The electronic correlation drives a
d+id superconducting pairing to be dominant over a wide filling region. All of the dc conductivity, the spin correlation, and the superconductivity are suppressed as the interlayer coupling strength increases, and the critical
Uc for the metal-insulator transition is also reduced. Our intensive numerical results reveal that twisted bilayer graphene should be a uniquely tunable platform for exploring strongly correlated phenomena.
To understand correlated insulating and unconventional superconducting states in twisted bilayer graphene, we perform a systematic study of spin and pairing correlations in an effective two-orbital Hubbard model, by using the ground-state constrained-path quantum Monte Carlo method. Our numerical simulations reveal that when only the on-site Hubbard
U is considered, the long-range magnetic order develops for $U\ensuremath{\ge}3.2t$ at half filling. Upon doping away from half filling, an analysis based on the pairing correlations and corresponding vertex contributions identifies that pairing with the
d+id symmetry is the dominant pairing channel. As the on-site Coulomb interaction is increased, both spin correlation and effective pairing interaction are enhanced simultaneously, indicating the intimate relation between magnetism and superconductivity. An inclusion of nearest neighbor Coulomb interaction
V results in a suppression of the
d+id superconductivity, but it can survive in the small
V regime. Our findings are useful for clarifying the ongoing controversy on the superconducting pairing symmetry in twisted bilayer graphene.
The physics of twisted bilayer graphene away from the exactly solvable chiral limit and the quantum Monte Carlo sign-problem-free charge neutrality point is elusive due to the exponential increase in the computational complexity, which has rendered explanations of experimentally observed insulating and superconducting phases restricted largely to the perturbative level. Here we focus on the filling factor
ν=±2 and address the question of the strain dependence of the interacting ground state by approximate quantum Monte Carlo (AQMC), state-of-the-art exact diagonalization (ED) and Hartree-Fock (HF) mean field, in order to investigate the strain-tuned transition from the Kramers intervalley coherent (KIVC) state to the incommensurate Kekulé spiral (IKS) state. While all three methods capture the KIVC order, only ED and HF detect the weaker IKS order that AQMC does not capture adequately. As the AQMC is still capable of capturing stronger orders like the KIVC, our combined protocol may open the door for further understanding of the rich phases of twisted bilayer graphene and other strongly-correlated systems.