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Berry curvature dipole generation and helicity-to-spin conversion at symmetry-mismatched heterointerfaces

Nature Nanotechnology volume 18, pages 867–874 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Berry curvature dipole (BCD) is a key parameter that describes the geometric nature of energy bands in solids. It defines the dipole-like distribution of Berry curvature in the band structure and plays a key role in emergent nonlinear phenomena. The theoretical rationale is that the BCD can be generated at certain symmetry-mismatched van der Waals heterointerfaces even though each material has no BCD in its band structure. However, experimental confirmation of such a BCD induced via breaking of the interfacial symmetry remains elusive. Here we demonstrate a universal strategy for BCD generation and observe BCD-induced gate-tunable spin-polarized photocurrent at WSe2/SiP interfaces. Although the rotational symmetry of each material prohibits the generation of spin photocurrent under normal incidence of light, we surprisingly observe a direction-selective spin photocurrent at the WSe2/SiP heterointerface with a twist angle of 0°, whose amplitude is electrically tunable with the BCD magnitude. Our results highlight a BCD–spin–valley correlation and provide a universal approach for engineering the geometric features of twisted heterointerfaces.

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Fig. 1: Generation of spin photocurrent at the heterointerface.
Fig. 2: Geometric configuration of spin photocurrent generated from the heterointerface.
Fig. 3: Spin photocurrent at heterointerfaces with different symmetries.
Fig. 4: Microscopic origin of spin photocurrent at the WSe2/SiP heterointerface.

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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the A3 Foresight Program—Emerging Materials Innovation. We acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 51861145201 (H.T.Y.), 52072168 (H.T.Y.), 21733001 (H.T.Y.) and 12204232 (F.Q.)), the Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials (H.T.Y.), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant numbers 2018YFA0306200 (H.T.Y.) and 2021YFA1202901 (J.H.)), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (grant number BK20220758 (F.Q.)) and Kakenhi grant JP19H05602 (Y.I.), JP22H04584 (T.I.) and JP23H00088 (T.I.) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and JST PRESTO (grant number JPMJPR19L1 (T.I.)), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (B.L.), the National Science Foundation through Princeton University’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center DMR-2011750 (B.L.) and the National Science Foundation under award DMR-2141966 (B.L.).

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Siyu Duan, Feng Qin, Peng Chen.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Siyu Duan, Feng Qin, Peng Chen, Caiyu Qiu, Junwei Huang, Zeya Li, Xiangyu Bi & Hongtao Yuan

  2. Institute of Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Xupeng Yang

  3. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Gan Liu, Fanhao Meng & Xiaoxiang Xi

  4. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Fanhao Meng & Jie Yao

  5. Quantum Phase Electronic Center and Department of Applied Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Toshiya Ideue & Yoshihiro Iwasa

  6. Institute for Solid State Physics, The University of Tokyo, Chiba, Japan

    Toshiya Ideue

  7. Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Biao Lian

  8. RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, Wako, Japan

    Yoshihiro Iwasa

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Contributions

S.D., F.Q. and P.C. contributed equally to this work. H.T.Y. and Y.I. conceived this project. S.D., Z.L., X.B. and P.C. fabricated the devices. S.D., F.Q., C.Q. and J.H. established the photocurrent measurement setup. S.D., X.Y., F.M. and F.Q. performed the photocurrent measurements. S.D., G.L. and X.X. performed the second harmonic generation measurements. B.L. performed the theoretical analysis of the moiré k · p model. S.D., F.Q., T.I. and J.Y. analysed the photocurrent data. S.D., F.Q., B.L. and H.T.Y. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Toshiya Ideue, Biao Lian or Hongtao Yuan.

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Duan, S., Qin, F., Chen, P. et al. Berry curvature dipole generation and helicity-to-spin conversion at symmetry-mismatched heterointerfaces. Nat. Nanotechnol. 18, 867–874 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01417-z

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