Correlated Dirac Fermions in Twisted Bilayers of MoS₂

Artificial honeycomb lattices are essential for understanding exotic quantum phenomena arising from the interplay between Dirac physics and electron correlation. This work shows that the top two moiré valence bands in rhombohedral-stacked twisted MoS₂ bilayers (tb-MoS₂) form a honeycomb lattice with massless Dirac fermions. The hopping and Coulomb interaction parameters are explicitly determined based on large-scale ab initio calculations. The system exhibits significant nonlocal Coulomb repulsion and can be described by the extended Hubbard model. At half-filling, strong Coulomb repulsion in free-standing tb-MoS₂ drives the system away from the semimetal phase, resulting in strongly correlated Dirac fermions. By varying the twist angle and dielectric environment, the Hamiltonian parameters can be tuned in a wide range, enabling transitions between distinct quantum phases. The high tunability makes tb-MoS₂ a promising simulator for exploring many-body effects of Dirac fermions.