Signature of parity anomaly in the measurement of optical Hall conductivity in quantum anomalous Hall systems

Abstract

Parity anomaly is a quantum mechanical effect that the parity symmetry in a two-dimensional classical action is failed to be restored in any regularization of the full quantum theory and is characterized by a half-quantized Hall conductivity. Here we propose a scheme to explore the experimental signature from parity anomaly in the measurement of optical Hall conductivity, in which the optical Hall conductivity is nearly half quantized for a proper range of frequency. The behaviors of optical Hall conductivity are studied for several models, which reveal the appearance of half-quantized Hall conductivity in low or high-frequency regimes. The optical Hall conductivity can be extracted from the measurement of Kerr and Faraday rotations and the absorption rate of the circularly polarized light. This proposal provides a practical method to explore the signature of parity anomaly in topological quantum materials.

9 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Signature of Parity Anomaly: Crossover from One Half to Integer Quantized Hall Conductance in a Finite Magnetic Field
• Calculations of Chern number: equivalence of real-space and twisted-boundary-condition formulae
• Parity anomaly with impurities and the Pauli--Villars subtraction
• Tri-component-pairing chiral superconductivity on the honeycomb lattice with mixed $s$- and $d$-wave symmetries