Chern mosaic and ideal flat bands in equal-twist trilayer graphene

Abstract

We study trilayer graphene arranged in a staircase stacking configuration with equal consecutive twist angle. On top of the moir\'e cristalline pattern, a supermoir\'e long-wavelength modulation emerges that we treat adiabatically. For each valley, we find that the two central bands are topological with Chern numbers $C=\pm 1$ forming a Chern mosaic at the supermoir\'e scale. The Chern domains are centered around the high-symmetry stacking points ABA or BAB and they are separated by gapless lines connecting the AAA points, where the spectrum is fully connected. In the chiral limit and at a magic angle of $\theta \sim 1.69^\circ$, we prove that the central bands are exactly flat with ideal quantum curvature at ABA and BAB. Furthermore, we decompose them analytically as a superposition of an intrinsic color-entangled state with $\pm 2$ and a Landau level state with Chern number $\mp 1$. To connect with experimental configurations, we also explore the non-chiral limit with finite corrugation and find that the topological Chern mosaic pattern is indeed robust and the central bands are still well separated from remote bands.