- Editors' Suggestion
- Letter
Quantum Wigner molecules in moiré materials
Phys. Rev. B 108, L121411 – Published 26 September, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.L121411
Abstract
The few-body problem (with fermionic charge carriers) in isolated moiré quantum dots (MQDs) in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) bilayer materials with integer fillings, , is investigated by employing large-scale full configuration interaction (FCI; also termed exact diagonalization) computations, and by performing a comparative analysis of the ensuing first-order (charge densities) and second-order (conditional probability distributions, CPDs) correlation functions. With parameters representative of bilayer experimental TMD setups, our investigations reveal the determining role of the strong interparticle Coulombic repulsion in bringing about Wigner molecularization, which is associated with many-body physics beyond both that described by the Aufbau principle of natural atoms, as well as by the widely used Hubbard model for strongly interacting condensed-matter systems. In particular, for weak and moderate trilobal crystal-field deformations of the MQDs, the imperative employment of the CPDs brings to light the geometrical polygonal-ring configurations underlying the Wigner molecules (WMs) that remain hidden at the level of a charge-density analysis, apart from the case of when a pinned WM emerges in the charge density due to the coincidence of the symmetries associated with both the intrinsic geometry of the WM and the TMD trilobal crystal field of the confining pocket potential. The FCI numerically exact diagonalization results provide critical benchmarks for assessing and guiding the development of future computational methodologies of interacting strongly correlated fermions in isolated MQDs and their superlattices in TMD materials.