No Arabic abstract
The proposals for realizing exotic particles through coupling of quantum Hall effect to superconductivity involve spatially non-uniform magnetic fields. As a step toward that goal, we study, both theoretically and experimentally, a system of Dirac electrons exposed to an Abrikosov flux lattice. We theoretically find that non-uniform magnetic field causes a carrier-density dependent reduction of the Hall conductivity. Our studies show that this reduction originates from a rather subtle effect: a levitation of the Berry curvature within Landau levels broadened by the non-uniform magnetic field. Experimentally, we measure the magneto-transport in a monolayer graphene-hexagonal boron nitride - niobium diselenide (NbSe$_2$) heterostructure, and find a density-dependent reduction of the Hall resistivity of graphene as the temperature is lowered from above the superconducting critical temperature of NbSe$_2$, when the magnetic field is uniform, to below, where the magnetic field bunches into an Abrikosov flux lattice.
Spin-Hall conductivity (SHC) of fully relativistic (4x4 matrix) Dirac electrons is studied based on the Kubo formula aiming at possible application to bismuth and bismuth-antimony alloys. It is found that there are two distinct contributions to SHC, one only from the states near the Fermi energy and the other from all the occupied states. The latter remains even in the insulating state, i.e., when the chemical potential lies in the band-gap, and turns to have the same dependences on the chemical potential as the orbital susceptibility (diamagnetism), a surprising fact. These results are applied to bismuth-antimony alloys and the doping dependence of the SHC is proposed.
Existing investigations of the anomalous Hall effect i.e. a current flowing transverse to the electric field in the absence of an external magnetic field) are concerned with the transport current. However, for many applications one needs to know the total current, including its pure magnetization part. In this paper, we employ the two-dimensional massive Dirac equation to find the exact universal total current flowing along a potential step of arbitrary shape. For a spatially slowly varying potential we find the current density $mathbf{j}(vec r)$ and the energy distribution of the current density $mathbf{j}^varepsilon(vec r)$. The latter turns out to be unexpectedly nonuniform, behaving like a $delta$-function at the border of the classically accessible area at energy~$varepsilon$. To demonstrate explicitly the difference between the magnetization and transport currents we consider the transverse shift of an electron ray in an electric field.
Gapped graphene has been proposed to be a good platform to observe the valley Hall effect, a transport phenomenon involving the flow of electrons that are characterized by different valley indices. In the present work, we show that this phenomenon is better described as an instance of the orbital Hall effect, where the ambiguous valley indices are replaced by a physical quantity, the orbital magnetic moment, which can be defined uniformly over the entire Brillouin zone. This description removes the arbitrariness in the choice of arbitrary cut-off for the valley-restricted integrals in the valley Hall conductivity, as the conductivity in the orbital Hall effect is now defined as the Brillouin zone integral of a new quantity, called the orbital Berry curvature. This reformulation in terms of OHE provides the direct explanation to the accumulated opposite orbital moments at the edges of the sample, observed in previous Kerr rotation measurements.
Spin-Hall conductivity $sigma_{{rm s}xy}$ and orbital susceptibility $chi$ are investigated for the anisotropic Wolff Hamiltonian, which is an effective Hamiltonian common to Dirac electrons in solids. It is found that, both for $sigma_{{rm s}xy}$ and $chi$, the effect of anisotropy appears only in the prefactors, which is given as the Gaussian curvature of the energy dispersion, and their functional forms are equivalent to those of the isotropic Wolff Hamiltonian. As a result, it is revealed that the relationship between the spin Hall conductivity and the orbital susceptibility in the insulating state, $sigma_{{rm s}xy}=(3mc^2/hbar e)chi$, which was firstly derived for the isotropic Wolff Hamiltonian, is also valid for the anisotropic Wolff Hamiltonian. Based on this theoretical finding, the magnitude of spin-Hall conductivity is estimated for bismuth and its alloys with antimony by that of orbital susceptibility, which has good correspondence between theory and experiments. The magnitude of spin-Hall conductivity turns out to be as large as $esigma_{{rm s}xy} sim 10^4 {Omega}^{-1}{rm cm}^{-1}$, which is about 100 times larger than that of Pt.
We numerically study the interplay of band structure, topological invariant and disorder effect in two-dimensional electron system of graphene in a magnetic field. Two emph{distinct} quantum Hall effect (QHE) regimes exist in the energy band with the unconventional half-integer QHE appearing near the band center, consistent with the experimental observation. The latter is more robust against disorder scattering than the conventional QHE states near the band edges. The phase diagram for the unconventional QHE is obtained where the destruction of the Hall plateaus at strong disorder is through the float-up of extended levels toward band center and higher plateaus always disappear first. We further predict a new insulating phase between $ u =pm 2$ QHE states at the band center, which may explain the experimentally observed resistance discontinuity near zero gate voltage.