paper

Orbital Multiferroicity in Pentalayer Rhombohedral Graphene

arXiv:2308.08837 · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06572-w

Abstract

Ferroic orders describe spontaneous polarization of spin, charge, and lattice degrees of freedom in materials. Materials featuring multiple ferroic orders, known as multiferroics, play important roles in multi-functional electrical and magnetic device applications. 2D materials with honeycomb lattices offer exciting opportunities to engineer unconventional multiferroicity, where the ferroic orders are driven purely by the orbital degrees of freedom but not electron spin. These include ferro-valleytricity corresponding to the electron valley and ferro-orbital-magnetism supported by quantum geometric effects. Such orbital multiferroics could offer strong valley-magnetic couplings and large responses to external fields-enabling device applications such as multiple-state memory elements, and electric control of valley and magnetic states. Here we report orbital multiferroicity in pentalayer rhombohedral graphene using low temperature magneto-transport measurements. We observed anomalous Hall signals Rxy with an exceptionally large Hall angle (tanΘH > 0.6) and orbital magnetic hysteresis at hole doping. There are four such states with different valley polarizations and orbital magnetizations, forming a valley-magnetic quartet. By sweeping the gate electric field E we observed a butterfly-shaped hysteresis of Rxy connecting the quartet. This hysteresis indicates a ferro-valleytronic order that couples to the composite field E\cdot B, but not the individual fields. Tuning E would switch each ferroic order independently, and achieve non-volatile switching of them together. Our observations demonstrate a new type of multiferroics and point to electrically tunable ultra-low power valleytronic and magnetic devices.

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