No Arabic abstract
Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers are interesting materials in part because of their strong spin-orbit coupling. This leads to intrinsic spin-splitting of opposite signs in opposite valleys, so the valleys are intrinsically spin-polarized when hole-doped. We study spin response in a simple model of these materials, with an eye to identifying sharp collective modes (i.e, spin-waves) that are more commonly characteristic of ferromagnets. We demonstrate that such modes exist for arbitrarily weak repulsive interactions, even when they are too weak to induce spontaneous ferromagnetism. The behavior of the spin response is explored for a range of hole dopings and interaction strengths.
We study the effect of inhomogeneous strain on transition-metal dichalcogenides with a large intrinsic gap in their spectrum. It is found that, by tuning the chemical potential, superconductivity can preserve within the strain-induced discrete pseudo Landau levels (LLs), which introduce interesting topological properties to these systems. As we show, the superconductivity for integer fillings is quantum critical, and the quantum critical coupling strength is determined by the spacing between the two LLs closest to the Fermi level. For partial fillings, the superconducting gap is scaled linearly with the coupling strength, and decreases rapidly when the chemical potential shifts away from the middle of each LL. In the presence of a Zeeman field, a pair of Majorana modes emerge simultaneously in the two valleys of strained dichalcogenides. When valley symmetry is further destroyed, a single Majorana mode can be expected to emerge at the edges of the strained monolayer dichalcogenides.
Weyl semimetals are characterized by unconventional electromagnetic response. We present analytical expressions for all components of the frequency- and wave-vector-dependent charge-spin linear-response tensor of Weyl fermions. The spin-momentum locking of the Weyl Hamiltonian leads to a coupling between charge and longitudinal spin fluctuations, while transverse spin fluctuations remain decoupled from the charge. A real Weyl semimetal with multiple Weyl nodes can show this charge-spin coupling in equilibrium if its crystal symmetry is sufficiently low. All Weyl semimetals are expected to show this coupling if they are driven into a non-equilibrium stationary state with different occupations of Weyl nodes, for example by exploiting the chiral anomaly. Based on the response tensor, we investigate the low-energy collective excitations of interacting Weyl fermions. For a local Hubbard interaction, the charge-spin coupling leads to a dramatic change of the zero-sound dispersion: its velocity becomes independent of the interaction strength and the chemical potential and is given solely by the Fermi velocity. In the presence of long-range Coulomb interactions, the coupling transforms the plasmon modes into spin plasmons. For real Weyl semimetals with multiple Weyl nodes, the collective modes are strongly affected by the presence of parallel static electric and magnetic fields, due to the chiral anomaly. In particular, the zero-sound frequency at fixed momentum and the spin content of the spin plasmons go through cusp singularities as the chemical potential of one of the Weyl cones is tuned through the Weyl node. We discuss possible experiments that could provide smoking-gun evidence for Weyl physics.
We study valley-dependent spin transport theoretically in monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides in which a variety of spin and valley physics are expected because of spin-valley coupling. The results show that the spins are valley-selectively excited with appropriate carrier doping and valley polarized spin current (VPSC) is generated. The VPSC leads to the spin-current Hall effect, transverse spin accumulation originating from the Berry curvature in momentum space. The results indicate that spin excitations with spin-valley coupling lead to both valley and spin transport, which is promising for future low-consumption nanodevice applications.
Manipulating spin polarization of electrons in nonmagnetic semiconductors by means of electric fields or optical fields is an essential theme of the conceptual nonmagnetic semiconductor-based spintronics. Here we experimentally demonstrate a method of generating spin polarization in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) by the circularly polarized optical pumping. The fully spin-polarized photocurrent is achieved through the valley dependent optical selection rules and the spin-valley locking in monolayer WS2, and electrically detected by a lateral spin-valve structure with ferromagnetic contacts. The demonstrated long spin lifetime, the unique valley contrasted physics and the spin-valley locking make monolayer WS2 an unprecedented candidate for semiconductor based spintronics.
We study both the intrinsic and extrinsic spin Hall effect in spin-valley coupled monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides. We find that whereas the skew-scattering contribution is suppressed by the large band gap, the side-jump contribution is comparable to the intrinsic one with opposite sign in the presence of scalar and magnetic scattering. Intervalley scattering tends to suppress the side-jump contribution due to the loss of coherence. By tuning the ratio of intra- to intervalley scattering, the spin Hall conductivity shows a sign change in hole-doped samples. Multiband effect in other doping regime is considered, and it is found that the sign change exists in the heavily hole-doped regime, but not in the electron-doped regime.