We show that electron crystals compete closely with non-Abelian fractional Chern insulators in the half-full second moir\'e band of twisted bilayer MoTe$_2$. Depending on the twist angle and microscopic model, these crystals can have non-zero or zero Chern numbers. The latter relies on cancellation between contributions from the full first miniband (+1) and the half-full second miniband (-1). For this reason, we call it an anti-topological crystal. Surprisingly, it occurs despite the lowest two non-interacting bands in a given valley having the same Chern number of +1. The anti-topological crystal is a novel type of electron crystal that may appear in systems with multiple Chern bands at filling factors $n > 1$.
Categories: cond-mat.mes-hall