Optical control of topological memory based on orbital magnetization

Abstract

Under suitable conditions, some twisted graphene multilayers and transition-metal dichalcogenides become Chern insulators, exhibiting the anomalous quantum Hall effect and orbital magnetization due to spontaneous valley polarization. We study interaction of a Chern insulator with circularly polarized light. The interaction energy contains an antisymmetric term that couples to the helicity of incident light. For a two-band Chern insulator, this term is expressed as an integral involving the Berry curvature of the system. Taking advantage of this interaction, we propose an experimental protocol for switching topological memory based on orbital magnetization by circularly polarized light. Moreover, two laser beams of opposite circular polarization can nucleate domains of opposite magnetization and thus produce an optically configurable domain wall carrying topologically protected chiral edge modes.

17 pages, 6 figures. New figure 4 added. New references [43] and [44] added. Corresponds to the published version

References in corpus (11)

• The Valley Hall Effect in MoS2 Transistors
• Valley Dependent Optoelectronics from Inversion Symmetry Breaking
• First Principles Calculation of Anomalous Hall Conductivity in Ferromagnetic bcc Fe
• High Resolution Polar Kerr Effect Measurements of Sr2RuO4: Evidence for Broken Time Reversal Symmetry in the Superconducting State
• Quantum anomalous Hall effect from intertwined moiré bands
• Time-reversal symmetry-breaking charge order in a kagome superconductor
• Orbital magnetization in periodic insulators
• Ultrafast Generation of Pseudo-magnetic Field for Valley Excitons in WSe2 Monolayers
• Large, valley-exclusive Bloch-Siegert shift in monolayer WS2
• Time-reversal symmetry breaking by a $(d+id)$ density-wave state in underdoped cuprate superconductors
• Chiral transport along magnetic domain walls in the quantum anomalous Hall effect

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Control of chiral orbital currents in a colossal magnetoresistance material
• Tunable moiré materials for probing Berry physics and topology
• Effects of relaxation on photovoltaic effect and possibility of photocurrent within transparent region
• Optical Switching of Moiré Chern Ferromagnet
• Effects of Boundary on Orbital Magnetization for a Bilayer System with Different Chern Numbers
• Orbital magnetization senses the topological phase transition in a spin-orbit coupled $\alpha$-$T_3$ system
• Direct current in a stirred optical lattice
• Optical conductivity and orbital magnetization of Floquet vortex states
• Interaction robustness of the chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals and Luttinger liquids from a mixed anomaly approach
• Invisible flat bands on a topological chiral edge