We study the Hofstadter butterfly and Landau levels of the twisted bilayer graphene (TBG). We show that the nontrivial fragile topology of the lowest two bands near the charge neutral point makes their Hofstadter butterfly generically connected with higher bands, closing the gap between the first and second conduction (valence) bands at a certain magnetic flux per unit cell. We also develop a momentum space method for calculating the TBG Hofstadter butterfly, from which we identify three phases where the Hofstadter butterflies of the lowest two bands and the higher bands are connected in different ways. We show this leads to a crossing between the $\nu =4$ Landau fan from the charge neutral point and the zero-field band gap at one flux per moiré unit cell, which corresponds to a magnetic field $25{\theta }^2\mathrm{T}$ (twist angle $\theta$ in degrees). This provides an experimentally testable feature of the fragile topology. In general, we expect it to be a generic feature that the Hofstadter butterfly of the topological bands are connected with the Hofstadter spectra of other bands. We further show the TBG band theory with Zeeman splitting being the most sizable splitting could result in Landau fans at the charge neutral point and half fillings near the magic angle, and we predict their variations under an in-plane magnetic field.

• Received 14 December 2018
• Revised 8 July 2020
• Accepted 9 July 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.041402