Hofstadter subband ferromagnetism and symmetry-broken Chern insulators in twisted bilayer graphene

When the twist angle between two layers of graphene is approximately 1.1°, interlayer tunnelling and rotational misalignment conspire to create a pair of flat bands¹ that are known to host various insulating, superconducting and magnetic states when they are partially filled^2–7. Most work has focused on the zero-magnetic-field phase diagram, but here we show that twisted bilayer graphene in a finite magnetic field hosts a cascade of ferromagnetic Chern insulators with Chern number ∣C∣ = 1, 2 and 3. The emergence of the Chern insulators is driven by the interplay of the moiré superlattice with the magnetic field, which endows the flat bands with a substructure of topologically non-trivial subbands characteristic of the Hofstadter butterfly^8,9. The new phases can be accounted for in a Stoner picture¹⁰; in contrast to conventional quantum Hall ferromagnets, electrons polarize into between one and four copies of a single Hofstadter subband^1,11,12. Distinct from other moiré heterostructures^13–15, Coulomb interactions dominate in twisted bilayer graphene, as manifested by the appearance of Chern insulating states with spontaneously broken superlattice symmetry at half filling of a C = −2 subband^16,17. Our experiments show that twisted bilayer graphene is an ideal system in which to explore the strong-interaction limit within partially filled Hofstadter bands.