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PSEUDOSPINTRONICS

Black phosphorous for pseudospintronics

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 263–264 (2020)Cite this article

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Black phosphorus is reported to be a bipolar pseudospin semiconductor, exhibiting a net pseudospin polarization with opposite polarization directions for the conduction and valence bands. These properties make it a promising candidate for application in pseudospintronics.

Spin is an important quantum index for elementary particles. The concept of pseudospin is a generalization of spin to a two-level quantum system that originates from the two carbon sublattices in graphene3. In principle, pseudospin can be utilized for pseudospintronics (Fig. 1c), in analogy to charge in electronics (Fig. 1a) and spin in spintronics (Fig. 1b). However, graphene is not suitable for pseudospintronics because it lacks a net pseudospin polarization and an energy gap, both of which are prerequisites for such device applications. Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (for example, MoS2) complement graphene with a finite bandgap. The selective optical excitation of electrons from different momentum valleys is attractive for valleytronics; however, the opposite momentum valleys are degenerate in energy, resulting in the absence of net valley polarization.

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Fig. 1: Electronics, spintronics and pseudospintronics.
Fig. 2: The origin of net pseudospin in black phosphorous and its connection with graphene.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Changhua Bao & Shuyun Zhou

  2. State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Changhua Bao & Shuyun Zhou

  3. Frontier Science Center for Quantum Information, Beijing, China

    Shuyun Zhou

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  1. Changhua Bao
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  2. Shuyun Zhou
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Correspondence to Shuyun Zhou.

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Bao, C., Zhou, S. Black phosphorous for pseudospintronics. Nat. Mater. 19, 263–264 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0614-y

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