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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Intrinsic Fermi-surface contribution to the bulk photovoltaic effect

Lingyuan Gao1,*, Zachariah Addison2,*, E. J. Mele2, and Andrew M. Rappe1,†

  • 1Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104–6323, USA
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Corresponding author: rappe@sas.upenn.edu
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Phys. Rev. Research 3, L042032 – Published 29 November, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L042032

Abstract

We study the Fermi surface contribution to the nonlinear DC photocurrent at quadratic order in a spatially uniform optical field in the ultraclean limit. In addition to shift and injection current, we find that polarized light incident on a metallic system generates an intrinsic contribution to the bulk photovoltaic effect deriving from photoinduced electronic transitions on the Fermi surface. In velocity gauge, this contribution originates in both the coherent band off-diagonal and diagonal parts of the density matrix, describing, respectively, the coherent wave function evolution and the carrier dynamics of an excited population. We derive a formula for the intrinsic Fermi surface contribution for a time-reversal invariant chiral Weyl semimetal illuminated with circularly polarized light. At low frequency, this response is proportional to the frequency of the driving field, with its sign determined by the topological charge of the Weyl nodes and with its magnitude being comparable to the recently discovered quantized circular photogalvanic effect. Our work presents a complete derivation for all contributions to nonlinear DC photocurrent and classifies them according to the polarization of light in the presence and absence of time-reversal symmetry.

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Corrections

10 December, 2021

Correction: The omission of a “Corresponding author” identifier and email address has been fixed.

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Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Research 3, L042032– Published 29 November, 2021
  • Received 19 November 2020
  • Revised 18 October 2021
  • Accepted 21 October 2021
  • Corrected 10 December 2021
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