Quantized circular photogalvanic effect in Weyl semimetals

By Fernado de Juan, A. Grushin, T. Morimoto, J. Moore. Nature Communications, 2016

678 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The circular photogalvanic effect (CPGE) is the part of a photocurrent that switches depending on the sense of circular polarization of the incident light. It has been consistently observed in systems without inversion symmetry and depends on non-universal material details. Here we find that in a class of Weyl semimetals (for example, SrSi2) and three-dimensional Rashba materials (for example, doped Te) without inversion and mirror symmetries, the injection contribution to the CPGE trace is effectively quantized in terms of the fundamental constants e, h, c and with no material-dependent parameters. This is so because the CPGE directly measures the topological charge of Weyl points, and non-quantized corrections from disorder and additional bands can be small over a significant range of incident frequencies. Moreover, the magnitude of the CPGE induced by a Weyl node is relatively large, which enables the direct detection of the monopole charge with current techniques. Photocurrent switches depend on circular polarization of the incident light. Here, De Juanet al. report a quantized circular photogalvanic effect as a measure of the topological charge of Weyl points in a class of Weyl semimetals and three-dimensional Rashba materials.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55b18db767a26b633d371413d938633886d743b7

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “, Floquet topological insulators [34–39]), and were also recently envisaged as probes for topological matter [40,41].”
Topological Semimetals from First Principles (2018, background): “The breaking of P symmetry in nonmagnetic Weyl semimetals suggests that they may have interesting nonlinear optical properties, such as second harmonic generation and shift current, and these nonlinear optical responses have recently attracted much recent attention (106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111).”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “Using the universal coefficient e3 ~2c 0 = 22.2 A W ·ps , de Juan et al., 2017 predict for τ ∼ 1 ps a steady state photocurrent of ∼ 2 nAW/cm2 , which is approximately 100 times that found in the topological insulator films (Okada et al., 2016).”
Light control with Weyl semimetals (2022, neutral): “only been investigated recently [153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 11, 158, 159, 160, 161]; a”