Stabilizing fractional Chern insulators via exchange interaction in moiré systems

Abstract: Recent experimental discovery of fractional Chern insulator in moir\'e Chern band in twisted transition metal dichalocogenide homobilayers has sparked intensive interest in exploring the ways of engineering band topology and correlated states in moir\'e systems. In this letter, we demonstrate that, with an additional exchange interaction induced by proximity effect, the topology and bandwidth of the moir\'e minibands of twisted $\mathrm{MoTe_2}$ homobilayers can be easily tuned. Fractional Chern insulators at -2/3 filling are found to appear at enlarged twist angles over a large range of twist angles with enhanced many-body gaps. We further discover a topological phase transition between the fractional Chern insulator, quantum anomalous Hall crystal, and charge density wave. Our results shed light on the interplay between topology and correlation physics.