Spin-orbit coupling induced valley Hall effects in transition-metal dichalcogenides

In transition-metal dichalcogenides, electrons in the K -valleys can experience both Ising and Rashba spin-orbit couplings. In this work, we show that the coexistence of Ising and Rashba spin-orbit couplings leads to a special type of valley Hall effect, which we call spin-orbit coupling induced val...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications physics 2019-03, Vol.2 (1), Article 26
Main Authors: Zhou, Benjamin T., Taguchi, Katsuhisa, Kawaguchi, Yuki, Tanaka, Yukio, Law, K. T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301/119/995
639/766/119/1000/1018
639/925/927/1007
Chalcogenides
Conduction bands
Couplings
Degrees of freedom
Electromagnetism
Electronic devices
Hall effect
Ising model
Magnetism
Optoelectronic devices
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Spin-orbit interactions
Transition metal compounds
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Summary:In transition-metal dichalcogenides, electrons in the K -valleys can experience both Ising and Rashba spin-orbit couplings. In this work, we show that the coexistence of Ising and Rashba spin-orbit couplings leads to a special type of valley Hall effect, which we call spin-orbit coupling induced valley Hall effect. Importantly, near the conduction band edge, the valley-dependent Berry curvatures generated by spin-orbit couplings are highly tunable by external gates and dominate over the intrinsic Berry curvatures originating from orbital degrees of freedom under accessible experimental conditions. We show that the spin-orbit coupling induced valley Hall effect is manifested in the gate dependence of the valley Hall conductivity, which can be detected by Kerr effect experiments. The valley Hall effect in transition metal dichalcogenides has been studied as a potential mean to develop new electronic and optoelectronic devices. The authors theoretically demonstrate that valley Hall effect can be derived from spin degrees of freedom, which is distinct from the conventional orbital related type.
ISSN:2399-3650
2399-3650
DOI:10.1038/s42005-019-0127-7