arXiv · 1811.00987
Momentum alignment and the optical valley Hall effect in low-dimensional Dirac materials
Abstract
We study the momentum alignment of photoexcited carriers and the optical control of valley population in gapless and gapped two-dimensional Dirac materials. The trigonal warping effect leads to the spatial separation of charge carriers belonging to different valleys upon linearly polarized high-frequency photoexcitation. Valley separation in gapped materials can be detected by measuring the degree of circular polarization of band-edge photoluminescence at different sides of the sample or light spot (optical valley Hall effect). We demonstrate that the celebrated Rashba effect, caused by substrate-induced system asymmetry, leads to a strong anisotropy in the low-energy part of the spectrum. This results in optical valley separation by a linearly polarized excitation at much lower frequencies compared to the high-energy trigonal warping regime. We also show that the momentum alignment phenomenon explains the giant enhancement of near-band-edge interband optical transitions in narrow-gap carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons independent of the mechanism of the gap formation. These enhanced transitions can be used in terahertz emitters based on low-dimensional Dirac materials.
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V. A. Saroka, R. R. Hartmann, M. E. Portnoi. 2018-11-02. Momentum alignment and the optical valley Hall effect in low-dimensional Dirac materials. https://doi.org/10.1134/s1063776122100107
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