Emergent localization in dodecagonal bilayer quasicrystals

Abstract

Long range order in the absence of translational symmetry gives rise to drastic revolution of our common knowledge in condensed-matter physics. Quasicrystals, as such an unconventional system, became a plethora to test our insights and to find exotic states of matter. In particular, electronic properties in quasicrystals have gotten lots of attention along with their experimental realization and controllability in twisted bilayer systems. In this work, we study how quasicrystalline order in bilayer systems can induce unique localization of electrons without any extrinsic disorders. We focus on the dodecagonal quasicrystal that has been demonstrated in twisted bilayer graphene system in recent experiments. In the presence of a small gap, we show the localization generically occurs due to the nonperiodic nature of quasicrystals, which is evidenced by the inverse participation ratio and the energy-level statistics. We understand the origin of such localization by approximating the dodecagonal quasicrystals as an impurity scattering problem.