2025/10/16 by Hui Liu, Raul Perea-Causin, Liu, Hui +5 · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphene research and applications #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.15027
openalex publication_date 2025/10/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The discovery of zero-field fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) in moiré materials has attracted intense interest in the interplay between topology and correlations. Here, we demonstrate that fractionalized topological order can emerge under realistic conditions even within a topologically trivial moiré band. By projecting long-range Coulomb interactions into a trivial band of twisted multilayer graphene, we identify a set of incompressible FCI ground states exhibiting fractional quantized Hall conductance. Their Laughlin-like behavior is further confirmed through the particle-cut entanglement spectrum. We trace the origin of this phase to the strongly inhomogeneous distribution of quantum geometry within the moiré Brillouin zone, which reshapes interaction effects independently of the band topology. Extending this heuristic quantum geometric mechanism, we demonstrate that similarly unexpected Laughlin-like FCIs can also be stabilized in higher-Chern-number moiré bands under experimentally accessible conditions. Our results establish realistic scenarios under which many-body topological order can emerge independently of single-particle band topology.