Dynamic Kohn anomaly in twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract Twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) has attracted great interest in the last decade due to the novel properties it exhibited. It was revealed that e–phonon interaction plays an important role in a variety of phenomena in this system, such as superconductivity and exotic phases. However, due to its complexity, the e–phonon interaction in TBG is not well studied yet. In this work, we study the electron interaction with the acoustic phonon mode in TBG and one of its consequences, i.e. the Kohn anomaly. The Kohn anomaly in ordinary metals usually happens at phonon momentum <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>q</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>k</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>F</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> as a dramatic modification of the phonon frequency when the phonon wave vector nests the electron Fermi surface. However, novel Kohn anomaly can happen in topological semimetals, such as graphene and Weyl semimetals. In this work, we show that the novel dynamic Kohn anomaly can also take place in TBG due to the nesting of two different Moire Dirac points by the phonon wave vector. Moreover, by tuning the twist angle, the dynamic Kohn anomaly in TBG shows different features. Particularly, at magic angle when the electron bandwidth is almost flat, the dynamic Kohn anomalies of acoustic phonons disappear. We also studied the effects of finite temperature and doping on the dynamic Kohn anomaly in TBG and discussed the experimental methods to observe the Kohn anomaly in such system.