Effect of structural relaxation on the electronic structure of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

We performed calculations of electronic, optical and transport properties of graphene on hBN with realistic moir'e patterns. The latter are produced by structural relaxation using a fully atomistic model. This relaxation turns out to be crucially important for electronic properties. We describe experimentally observed features such as additional Dirac points and the “Hofstadter butterfly” structure of energy levels in a magnetic field. We find that the electronic structure is sensitive to many-body renormalization of the local energy gap.