Valley-dependent giant orbital moments and transport feature in rhombohedral graphene multilayers

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a great interest in orbital related electronics (also termed as orbitronics). In the current work, we present a first-principles density functional theory calculation on the orbital magnetic moments, intrinsic orbital Hall effect, and ordinary magnetoconductivity effects in rhombohedral graphene multilayers. Our calculations suggest a giant orbital moment that arises from inter-atomic cycloid motion, reaching over 30 muB under an intermediate gate voltage. This leads to a valley polarization under an external magnetic field, as observed in recent experiments [Nature 623, 41-47 (2023)]. In addition, the orbital-related transport feature exhibit significant responses that are potentially observed in experiments. We also suggest that under a periodic field driven (such as high frequency light field), the ungated graphene multilayers could host strong quantum anomalous and orbital Hall effects, engineered by the layer number. As the graphene multilayers are intrinsically nonmagnetic with negligible spin-orbit coupling, the orbital moments would not be entangled by spin-related signals. Thus, they serve as an ideal platform to conduct orbitronic measurements and utilization for next generation information read/write nanodevices.

6 figures, in press PRB

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