Plasmonic Dirac Cone In Twisted Bilayer Graphene

We discuss plasmons of biased twisted bilayer graphene when the Fermi level lies inside the gap. The collective excitations are a network of chiral edge plasmons (CEP) entirely composed of excitations in the topological electronic edge states that appear at the AB-BA interfaces. The CEP form a hexagonal network with a unique energy scale epsilon(p) = (e(2))/(epsilon(0)epsilon t(0)) with t(0) the moire lattice constant and. the dielectric constant. From the dielectric matrix we obtain the plasmon spectra that has two main characteristics: (i) a diverging density of states at zero energy, and (ii) the presence of a plasmonic Dirac cone at (h)omega similar to epsilon(p)/2 with sound velocity v(D) = 0.0075c, which is formed by zigzag and armchair current oscillations. A network model reveals that the antisymmetry of the plasmon bands implies that CEP scatter at the hexagon vertices maximally in the deflected chiral outgoing directions, with a current ratio of 4/9 into each of the deflected directions and 1=9 into the forward one. We show that scanning near-field microscopy should be able to observe the predicted plasmonic Dirac cone and its broken symmetry phases.