- Letter
Floquet valley-polarized quantum anomalous Hall state in nonmagnetic heterobilayers
Phys. Rev. B 105, L081115 – Published 28 February, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.L081115
Abstract
The valley-polarized quantum anomalous Hall (VQAH) state, which forwards a strategy for combining valleytronics and spintronics with nontrivial topology, attracts intensive interest in condensed-matter physics. So far, the exploration of VQAH states has still been limited to magnetic systems. Here, using the low-energy effective model and Floquet theorem, we propose an alternative mechanism to realize the Floquet VQAH state in nonmagnetic heterobilayers under light irradiation. We then realize this proposal via first-principles calculations in transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers, which initially possess the time-reversal invariant valley quantum spin Hall (VQSH) state. By irradiating circularly polarized light, the time-reversal invariant VQSH state can evolve into the VQAH state, behaving as an optically switchable topological spin-valley filter. These findings not only offer a rational scheme to realize the VQAH state in periodically driven nonmagnetic systems, but also pave a fascinating path for designing topological spintronic and valleytronic devices with high tunability. Our proposal can also be extended to design the general QAH effect without magnetic orders.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
- Chern insulators
- Edge states
- Photoinduced effect
- Spin filtering
- Topological materials
- Topological phase transition
- Topological phases of matter
- Valleytronics
- Transition metal dichalcogenides
- Bloch-Floquet theorem
- Density functional theory
- First-principles calculations
- Tight-binding model
- Wannier function methods
- k dot p method