Staggered Pseudo Magnetic Field in Twisted Transition Metal Dichalcogenides: Physical Origin and Experimental Consequences

Abstract

Strong magnetic fields profoundly affect the quantum physics of charged particles, as seen for example by the integer and fractionally quantized Hall effects, and the fractal `Hofstadter butterfly' spectrum of electrons in the presence of a periodic potential and a magnetic field. Intrinsic physics can lead to effects equivalent to those produced by an externally applied magnetic field. Examples include the `staggered flux' phases emerging in some theories of quantum spin liquids and the Chern insulator behavior of twisted bilayer graphene when valley symmetry is broken. In this paper we show that when two layers of the transition metal dichalcogenide material WSe2 are stacked at a small relative twist angle to form a Moire bilayer, the resulting low energy physics can be understood in terms of electrons moving in a strong and tunable staggered flux. We predict experimental consequences including sign reversals of the Hall coefficient on application of an interlayer potential and spin currents appearing at sample edges and interfaces.

References in corpus (8)

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Composite Fermi Liquid at Zero Magnetic Field in Twisted MoTe${}_2$
• Anomalous Hall Crystals in Rhombohedral Multilayer Graphene I: Interaction-Driven Chern Bands and Fractional Quantum Hall States at Zero Magnetic Field
• Topological and stacked flat bands in bilayer graphene with a superlattice potential
• Chiral Kondo Lattice in Doped MoTe${}_2$/WSe${}_2$ Bilayers
• Dynamical Mean Field Theory of Moiré Bilayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides: Phase Diagram, Resistivity, and Quantum Criticality
• Adiabatic Approximation and Aharonov-Casher Bands in Twisted Homobilayer TMDs
• Hofstadter Topology with Real Space Invariants and Reentrant Projective Symmetries
• Multilayer graphene with a superlattice potential
• Singlet, Triplet and Pair Density Wave Superconductivity in the Doped Triangular-Lattice Moiré System
• Chiral and nodal superconductors in t-J model with valley contrasting flux on triangular moiré lattice
• Theory of intervalley-coherent AFM order and topological superconductivity in tWSe${}_2$
• Intrinsically-multilayer moiré heterostructures
• Moiré Band Engineering in Twisted Trilayer WSe2
• Non-Abelian Chern band in rhombohedral graphene multilayers