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Band mixing and particle-hole asymmetry in moiré fractional Chern insulators

Nicolás Morales-Durán1,*, Jingtian Shi2, Cristian Voinea3,1, Paweł Potasz4, and Jennifer Cano5,1

  • *Contact author: nmoralesduran@flatironinstitute.org
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043146 – Published 9 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zf45-1gvb

Abstract

We investigate the effect of remote band mixing on the stability of fractional Chern insulators in a family of models that approximate continuum descriptions of moiré materials. Our results suggest that the experimentally observed asymmetry between filling fractions ν=1/3 and ν=2/3 in twisted MoTe2 originates from a competition between a fractional Chern insulator, an electron Wigner crystal, and a hole Wigner crystal. In the absence of band mixing, the leading instability at ν=1/3 is the electron crystal, whereas at ν=2/3 the main competing phase is the hole crystal. Remote band mixing substantially lowers the energy of the electron crystal but has only a weak effect on the hole crystal. Consequently, it brings competing crystalline states much closer in energy to the fractional Chern insulator at ν=1/3 than at ν=2/3, leading to a stronger suppression of the many-body gap. This mechanism also provides an explanation for the emergence of reentrant integer quantum anomalous Hall states in moiré MoTe2 for fillings ν>1/2.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 043146– Published 9 November, 2026
  • Received 7 May 2026
  • Accepted 27 October 2026
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