- Letter
Nonlinear layer Hall effect and detection of the hidden Berry curvature dipole in -symmetric antiferromagnetic insulators
Phys. Rev. B 114, L171110 – Published 17 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/k5f2-w2z7
Abstract
Recent experimental and theoretical studies have revealed the emergence of a linear layer Hall effect (LHE) induced by hidden Berry curvature in thin films. This phenomenon underscores the layer degree of freedom as a mechanism for generating Hall transport in layered materials. In this work, we predict a hidden Berry curvature dipole (BCD) in -symmetric layered antiferromagnets (AFMs), which manifests as a nonlinear LHE that is even with respect to the AFM order and odd with respect to the vertical electric field, in contrast to the linear LHE. The coexistence of both the hidden BCD and quantum metric dipole (QMD) interprets an asymmetric lineshape with respect to a vertical electric field as observed in recent experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the nonlinear Hall currents induced by the hidden BCD and QMD obey distinct symmetries and flow in different directions, which can be conveniently distinguished through the nonlinear anomalous Hall conductivity. Our proposed nonlinear LHE establishes an experimentally advantageous framework for exclusively probing the hidden BCD quantum geometry.