Polar unidirectional magnetotransport in -type tellurene from quantum geometry
Phys. Rev. B 114, 165402 – Published 3 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8nxq-m63t
Abstract
Unidirectional magnetoresistance, or electric magnetochiral anisotropy (eMChA), is a nonlinear magnetotransport effect emerging in noncentrosymmetric conductors. This phenomenon manifests as a resistance change proportional to the first power of both the electric current and applied magnetic field . The eMChA contribution takes distinct forms: (i) a chiral term, , and (ii) a polar term, , where denotes the electric polarization and and represent the respective eMChA coefficients. In Fontana et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 106602 (2025)], we provided empirical evidence that the eMChA in the conduction band of tellurene is polar and showed that it emerges from the quantum metric dipole associated with its Weyl node and from the lone pair polarization . Here, we extend this study to the valence band of tellurene, where the eMChA is commonly assumed to be chiral . We show that a finite polar coefficient also emerges naturally through a downfolding procedure, in which remote Weyl-node-containing bands induce momentum-space gradients of the quantum metric in the low-energy levels, activating finite metric dipoles. Combining semiclassical Boltzmann transport with a description of tellurene, our numerical calculations agree quantitatively with doping dependent second-harmonic measurements of the longitudinal voltage in perpendicular field. The combined chiral and polar characters of the eMChA in tellurene also explains the shift in the angular dependence of for in plane fields. Our results demonstrate that the polar eMChA can arise in topologically trivial bands through multiband effects and establish tellurene as a platform for quantum-geometric rectification in both electron and hole regimes.