Magic angle (in)stability and mobility edges in disordered Chern insulators

Abstract

Why do experiments only exhibit one magic angle if the chiral limit of the Bistritzer-MacDonald Hamiltonian suggest a plethora of them? - In this article, we investigate the remarkable stability of the first magic angle in contrast to higher (smaller) magic angles. More precisely, we examine the influence of disorder on magic angles and the Bistritzer-MacDonald Hamiltonian. We establish the existence of a mobility edge near the energy of the flat band for small disorder. We also show that the mobility edges persist even when all global Chern numbers become zero, leveraging the $C_{2z}T$ symmetry of the system to demonstrate non-trivial sublattice transport. This effect is robust even beyond the chiral limit and in the vicinity of perfect magic angles, as is expected from experiments