No Arabic abstract
The topological properties of a materials electronic structure are encoded in its Berry curvature, a quantity which is intimately related to the transverse electrical conductivity. In transition metal dichalcogenides with broken inversion symmetry, the nonzero Berry curvature results in a valley Hall effect. In this paper we identify a previously unrecognized consequence of Berry curvature in these materials: an electric field-induced change in the electrons charge density orientation. We use first principles calculations to show that measurements of the electric field-induced change in the charge density or local density of states in MoS$_2$ can be used to measure its energy-dependent valley and orbital Hall conductivity.
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.
We study the electronic structures and topological properties of $(M+N)$-layer twisted graphene systems. We consider the generic situation that $N$-layer graphene is placed on top of the other $M$-layer graphene, and is twisted with respect to each other by an angle $theta$. In such twisted multilayer graphene (TMG) systems, we find that there exists two low-energy flat bands for each valley emerging from the interface between the $M$ layers and the $N$ layers. These two low-energy bands in the TMG system possess valley Chern numbers that are dependent on both the number of layers and the stacking chiralities. In particular, when the stacking chiralities of the $M$ layers and $N$ layers are opposite, the total Chern number of the two low-energy bands for each valley equals to $pm(M+N-2)$ (per spin). If the stacking chiralities of the $M$ layers and the $N$ layers are the same, then the total Chern number of the two low-energy bands for each valley is $pm(M-N)$ (per spin). The valley Chern numbers of the low-energy bands are associated with large, valley-contrasting orbital magnetizations, suggesting the possible existence of orbital ferromagnetism and anomalous Hall effect once the valley degeneracy is lifted either externally by a weak magnetic field or internally by Coulomb interaction through spontaneous symmetry breaking.
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.
Electrons hopping in two-dimensional honeycomb lattices possess a valley degree of freedom in addition to charge and spin. In the absence of inversion symmetry, these systems were predicted to exhibit opposite Hall effects for electrons from different valleys. Such valley Hall effects have been achieved only by extrinsic means, such as substrate coupling, dual gating, and light illuminating. Here, we report the first observation of intrinsic valley Hall transport without any extrinsic symmetry breaking in the non-centrosymmetric monolayer and trilayer MoS2, evidenced by considerable nonlocal resistance that scales cubically with local resistance. Such a hallmark survives even at room temperature with a valley diffusion length at micron scale. By contrast, no valley Hall signal is observed in the centrosymmetric bilayer MoS2. Our work elucidates the topological quantum origin of valley Hall effects and marks a significant step towards the purely electrical control of valley degree of freedom in topological valleytronics.
Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) hold great promise for future information processing applications utilizing a combination of electron spin and valley pseudospin. This unique spin system has led to observation of the valley Zeeman effect in neutral and charged excitonic resonances under applied magnetic fields. However, reported values of the trion valley Zeeman splitting remain highly inconsistent across studies. Here, we utilize high quality hBN encapsulated monolayer WSe$_2$ to enable simultaneous measurement of both intervalley and intravalley trion photoluminescence. We find the valley Zeeman splitting of each trion state to be describable only by a combination of three distinct g-factors, one arising from the exciton-like valley Zeeman effect, the other two, trion specific, g-factors associated with recoil of the excess electron. This complex picture goes significantly beyond the valley Zeeman effect reported for neutral excitons, and eliminates the ambiguity surrounding the magneto-optical response of trions in tungsten based TMD monolayers.