The emergence of correlated insulating phases in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene exhibits strong sample dependence. Here, we derive an Anderson theorem governing the robustness against disorder of the Kramers intervalley… Click to show full abstract
The emergence of correlated insulating phases in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene exhibits strong sample dependence. Here, we derive an Anderson theorem governing the robustness against disorder of the Kramers intervalley coherent (K-IVC) state, a prime candidate for describing the correlated insulators at even fillings of the moiré flat bands. We find that the K-IVC gap is robust against local perturbations, which are odd under PT, where P and T denote particle-hole conjugation and time reversal, respectively. In contrast, PT-even perturbations will in general induce subgap states and reduce or even eliminate the gap. We use this result to classify the stability of the K-IVC state against various experimentally relevant perturbations. The existence of an Anderson theorem singles out the K-IVC state from other possible insulating ground states.
               
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