The Berry Phase Rectification Tensor and The Solar Rectification Vector

Abstract

We introduce an operational definition of the Berry Phase Rectification Tensor as the second-order change of polarization of a material in response to an ideal short pulse of an electric field. Under time-reversal symmetry this tensor depends exclusively on the Berry phases of the Bloch bands and not their energy dispersions, making it an intrinsic property to each material which contains contributions from both the inter-band shift currents and the intra-band Berry Curvature Dipole. We also introduce the Solar Rectification Vector as a technologically relevant figure of merit for a bulk photo-current generation under ideal black-body radiation in analogy with the classic solar cell model of Shockley and Queisser. We perform first-principles calculations of the Berry Phase Rectification Tensor and the Solar Rectification Vector for the Weyl semimetal TaAs and the insulator LiAsSe2 which features large shift currents close to the peak of solar radiation intensity.

13 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Weyl semimetal phase in non-centrosymmetric transition metal monophosphides
• The Berry curvature dipole in Weyl semimetal materials: an ab initio study
• First-Principles Calculation of the Bulk Photovoltaic Effect in the Polar Compounds LiAsS${}_{\text{2}}$, LiAsSe${}_{\text{2}}$, and NaAsSe${}_{\text{2}}$

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Rabi Regime of Current Rectification in Solids
• The Berry dipole photovoltaic demon and the thermodynamics of photo-current generation within the optical gap of metals
• The Fermi-Dirac staircase occupation of Floquet bands and current rectification inside the optical gap of metals: a rigorous perspective
• Spectral Density and Sum Rules for Second-Order Response Functions
• Layer photovoltaic effect in van der Waals heterostructures
• Correlation between electronic polarization and shift current in cubic and hexagonal semiconductors LiZn$X$ ($X$ = P, As, Sb)