Collective excitations of the Chern-insulator states in commensurate double moire superlattices of twisted bilayer graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

We study the collective excitation modes of the Chern insulator states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride (TBG/BN) at odd integer fillings (v) of the flat bands. For the 1x1 commensurate double moire superlattices in TBG/BN at three twist angles (0') between BN and graphene, self-consistent Hartree-Fock (HF) calculations show that the electron-electron interaction and the broken C2z symmetry lead to the Chern-insulator ground states with valley-spin flavor polarized HF bands at odd v. In the active-band approximation, the HF bands in the same flavor of TBG/BN are much more separated than those of the pristine TBG with TBG/BN having a larger intraflavor band gap so that the energies of the lowest intraflavor exciton modes of TBG/BN computed within the time-dependent HF method are much higher than those of TBG and reach about 20 meV and the exciton wave functions of TBG/BN become less localized than those of TBG. The interflavor valley-wave modes in TBG/BN have excitation energies higher than 2.5 meV, which is also much larger than that of TBG, while the spin-wave modes all have zero excitation gap. In contrast to TBG with particle-hole symmetric excitation modes for positive and negative v, the excitation spectrums and gaps of TBG/BN at positive v are rather different from those at negative v. The quantitative behavior of the excitation spectrum of TBG/BN also varies with 0'. Full HF calculations demonstrate that more HF bands besides the two central bands can have rather large contributions from the single-particle flat-band states; then the lowest exciton modes that determine the optical properties of the Chern insulator states in TBG/BN are generally the ones between the remote and flatlike bands, while the valley-wave modes have similar energies as those in the active-band approximation.