Stability of anomalous Hall crystals in multilayer rhombohedral graphene

Abstract

Amidst recent burning interest in quantum anomalous Hall phenomena in pentalayer graphene, the authors provide here an elegant understanding for existing numerical mean field results. Beyond mean field, the authors propose the picture of ``moir\'e-enabled Hall crystals'', emphasizing the crucial role of a moir\'e potential even when weak. The authors provide a connection between electronic crystals and the superconducting Little-Parks effect to explicitly demonstrate the quantization of Chern number associated with spontaneous crystalline order, analogous to quantization of vorticity in a superconducting ring under a background magnetic field.