Across a moiré pattern made of two layers, all possible stacking arrangements between the two materials occur. By understanding how each local environment modifies the energy levels of the monolayer electrons, we can build accurate models for the electronic structure of the entire moiré pattern. Just as the periodic potential of a crystal confines and hybridize bare electrons, causing banding of their energy levels, moiré patterns confine and hybridize the electronic quasiparticles of the constituent 2D layers. Likewise, this causes banding in the moiré electronic energy levels, but since it comes from a much longer periodic length (100 A instead of a few A), the new bands' energy scale are reciprocally much smaller (10s of meV instead of a few meV).

Variations in the local stacking environment affects the atoms of a 2D material in a moiré pattern as well. Each layer will allow small deformations in its structure to increase the relative area of stacking configurations with favorable (lower) energy and decrease the relative area of those with unfavorable (higher) energy. For small twist angles, this means the systems are predominantly composed by a uniform phase of identical, low energy stacking. These uniform domains are criss-crossed by intermediate stacking regions, which intersect at high-energy stacking nodes. As the local environment defines the electronic potential, this relaxation-induced confinement of the electron structure makes twistronic materials a good candidate for realizing 1D transport channels and quantum dot physics.