arXiv subjects

Di Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Di Xiao.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Anomalous Thermal Hall Effect in an Insulating van der Waals Magnet VI3

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) magnets have been a fertile playground for the discovery and exploration of physical phenomena and new physics. In this Letter, we report the observation of an anomalous thermal Hall effect (THE) with \k{appa}_xy ~ 1x10^(-2) W K^(-1) m^(-1) in an insulating van der Waals ferromagnet VI3. The thermal Hall signal persists in the absence of an external magnetic field and flips sign upon the switching of the magnetization. In combination with theoretical calculations, we show that VI3 exhibits a dual nature of the THE, i.e., dominated by topological magnons hosted by the ferromagnetic honeycomb lattice at higher temperatures and by phonons induced by the magnon-phonon coupling at lower temperatures. Our results not only position VI3 as the first ferromagnetic system to investigate both anomalous magnon and phonon THEs, but also render it as a potential platform for spintronics/magnonics applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

InSbAs two-dimensional electron gases as a platform for topological superconductivity

Topological superconductivity can be engineered in semiconductors with strong spin-orbit interaction coupled to a superconductor. Experimental advances in this field have often been triggered by the development of new hybrid material systems. Among these, two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) are of particular interest due to their inherent design flexibility and scalability. Here we discuss results on a 2D platform based on a ternary 2DEG (InSbAs) coupled to in-situ grown Aluminum. The spin-orbit coupling in these 2DEGs can be tuned with the As concentration, reaching values up to 400 meV$\unicode{xC5}$, thus exceeding typical values measured in its binary constituents. In addition to a large Landé g-factor $\sim$ 55 (comparable to InSb), we show that the clean superconductor-semiconductor interface leads to a hard induced superconducting gap. Using this new platform we demonstrate the basic operation of phase-controllable Josephson junctions, superconducting islands and quasi-1D systems, prototypical device geometries used to study Majorana zero modes.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Intrinsic nonlinear Hall effect in antiferromagnetic tetragonal CuMnAs

Detecting the orientation of the Néel vector is a major research topic in antiferromagnetic spintronics. Here we recognize the intrinsic nonlinear Hall effect, which is independent of the relaxation time, as a prominent contribution to the time-reversal-odd second order conductivity and can be used to detect the flipping of the Néel vector. In contrast, the Berry-curvature-dipole-induced nonlinear Hall effect depends linear on relaxation time and is time-reversal-even. We study the intrinsic nonlinear Hall effect in an antiferromagnetic metal: tetragonal CuMnAs, and show that its nonlinear Hall conductivity can reach the order of mA/V$^2$. The dependence on the chemical potential of such nonlinear Hall conductivity can be qualitatively explained by a tilted massive Dirac model. Moreover, we demonstrate its strong temperature dependence and briefly discuss its competition with the second order Drude conductivity. Finally, a complete survey of magnetic point groups are presented, providing guidelines for finding more antiferromagnetic materials with the intrinsic nonlinear Hall effect.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Electric Polarization in Inhomogeneous Crystals

We derive the charge density up to second order in spatial gradient in inhomogeneous crystals using the semiclassical coarse graining procedure based on the wave packet method. It can be recast as divergence of polarization, whose first-order contribution consists of three parts, a perturbative correction to the original Berry connection expression, a topological part that can be written as an integral of the Chern-Simons 3-form, and a previously-unknown, quadrupole-like contribution. The topological part can be related to the quantized fractional charge carried by a vortex in two dimensional systems. We then generalize our results to the multi-band case and show that the quadrupole-like contribution plays an important role, as it makes the total polarization gauge-independent. Finally, we verify our theory in several model systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Coherent strong-coupling of terahertz magnons and phonons in a Van der Waals antiferromagnetic insulator

Emergent cooperative motions of individual degrees of freedom, i.e. collective excitations, govern the low-energy response of system ground states under external stimulations and play essential roles for understanding many-body phenomena in low-dimensional materials. The hybridization of distinct collective modes provides a route towards coherent manipulation of coupled degrees of freedom and quantum phases. In magnets, strong coupling between collective spin and lattice excitations, i.e., magnons and phonons, can lead to coherent quasi-particle magnon polarons. Here, we report the direct observation of a series of terahertz magnon polarons in a layered zigzag antiferromagnet FePS3 via far-infrared (FIR) transmission measurements. The characteristic avoided-crossing behavior is clearly seen as the magnon-phonon detuning is continuously changed via Zeeman shift of the magnon mode. The coupling strength g is giant, achieving 120 GHz (0.5 meV), the largest value reported so far. Such a strong coupling leads to a large ratio of g to the resonance frequency (g/ω) of 4.5%, and a value of 29 in cooperativity (g^2/γ_{ph}γ_{mag}). Experimental results are well reproduced by first-principle calculations, where the strong coupling is identified to arise from phonon-modulated anisotropic magnetic interactions due to spin-orbit coupling. These findings establish FePS3 as an ideal testbed for exploring hybridization-induced topological magnonics in two dimensions and the coherent control of spin and lattice degrees of freedom in the terahertz regime.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Electric control of a canted-antiferromagnetic Chern insulator

The interplay between band topology and magnetism can give rise to exotic states of matter. For example, magnetically doped topological insulators can realize a Chern insulator that exhibits quantized Hall resistance at zero magnetic field. While prior works have focused on ferromagnetic systems, little is known about band topology and its manipulation in antiferromagnets. Here, we report that MnBi$_2$Te$_4$ is a rare platform for realizing a canted-antiferromagnetic (cAFM) Chern insulator with electrical control. We show that the Chern insulator state with Chern number $C = 1$ appears as soon as the AFM to canted-AFM phase transition happens. The Chern insulator state is further confirmed by observing the unusual transition of the $C = 1$ state in the cAFM phase to the $C = 2$ orbital quantum Hall states in the magnetic field induced ferromagnetic phase. Near the cAFM-AFM phase boundary, we show that the Chern number can be toggled on and off by applying an electric field alone. We attribute this switching effect to the electrical field tuning of the exchange gap alignment between the top and bottom surfaces. Our work paves the way for future studies on topological cAFM spintronics and facilitates the development of proof-of-concept Chern insulator devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Hidden low-temperature magnetic order revealed through magnetotransport in monolayer CrSBr

Magnetic semiconductors are a powerful platform for understanding, utilizing and tuning the interplay between magnetic order and electronic transport. Compared to bulk crystals, two-dimensional magnetic semiconductors have greater tunability, as illustrated by the gate modulation of magnetism in exfoliated CrI$_3$ and Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$, but their electrically insulating properties limit their utility in devices. Here we report the simultaneous electrostatic and magnetic control of electronic transport in atomically-thin CrSBr, an A-type antiferromagnetic semiconductor. Through magnetotransport measurements, we find that spin-flip scattering from the interlayer antiferromagnetic configuration of multilayer flakes results in giant negative magnetoresistance. Conversely, magnetoresistance of the ferromagnetic monolayer CrSBr vanishes below the Curie temperature. A second transition ascribed to the ferromagnetic ordering of magnetic defects manifests in a large positive magnetoresistance in the monolayer and a sudden increase of the bulk magnetic susceptibility. We demonstrate this magnetoresistance is tunable with an electrostatic gate, revealing that the ferromagnetic coupling of defects is carrier mediated.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Magnetic domain wall substructures in Pt/Co/Ni/Ir multi-layers

We examine the substructures of magnetic domain walls (DWs) in [Pt/(Co/Ni)$_M$/Ir]$_N$ multi-layers using a combination of micromagnetic theory and Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM). Thermal stability calculations of Q=$\pm$1 substructures (2-$π$ vertical Bloch lines (VBLs) and DW skyrmions) were performed using a geodesic nudged elastic band (GNEB) model, which supports their metastability at room temperature. Experimental variation in strength of the interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) and film thickness reveals conditions under which these substructures are present and enables the formation of a magnetic phase diagram. Reduced thickness is found to favor Q=$\pm$1 substructures likely due to the suppression of hybrid DWs. The results from this study provide an important framework for examining 1-D DW substructures in chiral magnetic materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Thermal Hall Effect of Chiral Spin Fluctuations

Using a two-dimensional square lattice Heisenberg model with a Rashba-type Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, we demonstrate that chiral spin fluctuations can give rise to a thermal Hall effect in the absence of any static spin texture or momentum space topology. It is shown by means of Monte Carlo and stochastic spin dynamics simulations that the thermal Hall response is finite at elevated temperature outside of the linear spin wave regime and consistent with the presence of thermal fluctuation-induced nontrivial topology. Our result suggests that the high-fluctuation phases outside of the conventional regime of magnonics may yet be a promising area of exploration for spin-based electronics.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Mapping the phase diagram of the quantum anomalous Hall and topological Hall effects in a dual-gated magnetic topological insulator heterostructure

We use magnetotransport in dual-gated magnetic topological insulator heterostructures to map out a phase diagram of the topological Hall and quantum anomalous Hall effects as a function of the chemical potential (primarily determined by the back gate voltage) and the asymmetric potential (primarily determined by the top gate voltage). A theoretical model that includes both surface states and valence band quantum well states allows the evaluation of the variation of the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and carrier density with gate voltages. The qualitative agreement between experiment and theory provides strong evidence for the existence of a topological Hall effect in the system studied, opening up a new route for understanding and manipulating chiral magnetic spin textures in real space.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Highly Anisotropic Excitons and Multiple Phonon Bound States in a Van der Waals Antiferromagnetic Insulator

Two-dimensional semiconducting systems, such as quantum wells and transition metal dichalcogenides, are the foundations to investigate low dimensional light-matter interactions. To date, the study of elementary photoexcitation, namely the exciton, in 2D semiconductors with intrinsic magnetic order remains a challenge due to the lack of suitable material platforms. Here, we report an observation of excitons coupled to zigzag antiferromagnetic order in the layered antiferromagnetic insulator NiPS3 using both photoluminescence (PL) and optical reflection spectroscopy. The exciton exhibits a linewidth as narrow as ~350 ueV with near unity linear polarization in the PL spectrum. As the thicknesses of samples is reduced from five layers to bilayers, the PL intensity is drastically suppressed and eventually vanishes in monolayers, consistent with the calculated bandgap being highly indirect for both bilayer and monolayer. We observed strong linear dichroism (LD) over a broad spectra range, which shares the same optical anisotropy axis, being locked to the zigzag direction, as the exciton PL. Both LD and the degree of linear polarization in the exciton PL decrease as the temperature increases and become negligible above the Neel temperature. These observations suggest both optical quantities are probes of the symmetry breaking magnetic order parameter. In addition, a sharp resonance in the LD spectrum is observed with an energy near the exciton PL. There exist over ten exciton-A1g phonon bound states on its high energy side, which likely result from the strong modulation of the ligand-to-metal charge transfer energy by strong electron-lattice interactions. Our work establishes NiPS3 as a new 2D platform for exploring magneto-exciton physics with strong correlations, as well as a building block for 2D heterostructures for engineering physical phenomena with time reversal symmetry breaking.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Spin Photovoltaic Effect in Magnetic van der Waals Heterostructures

The development of van der Waals (vdW) crystals and their heterostructures has created a fascinating platform for exploring optoelectronic properties in the two-dimensional (2D) limit. With the recent discovery of 2D magnets, the control of the spin degree of freedom can be integrated to realize 2D spin-optoelectronics with spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking. Here, we report spin photovoltaic effects in vdW heterostructures of atomically thin magnet chromium triiodide (CrI3) sandwiched by graphene contacts. In the absence of a magnetic field, the photocurrent displays a distinct dependence on light helicity, which can be tuned by varying the magnetic states and photon energy. Circular polarization-resolved absorption measurements reveal that these observations originate from magnetic-order-coupled and thus helicity-dependent charge-transfer exciton states. The photocurrent displays multiple plateaus as the magnetic field is swept, which are associated with different spin configurations enabled by the layered antiferromagnetism and spin-flip transitions in CrI3. Remarkably, giant photo-magnetocurrent is observed, which tends to infinity for a small applied bias. Our results pave the way to explore emergent photo-spintronics by engineering magnetic vdW heterostructures.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Compressed Sensing Based Image Coding by Using Gray Transformation

In recent years, compressed sensing (CS) based image coding has become a hot topic in image processing field. However, since the bit depth required for encoding each CS sample is too large, the compression performance of this paradigm is unattractive. To address this issue, a novel CS-based image coding system by using gray transformation is proposed. In the proposed system, we use a gray transformation to preprocess the original image firstly and then use CS to sample the transformed image. Since gray transformation makes the probability distribution of CS samples centralized, the bit depth required for encoding each CS sample is reduced significantly. Consequently, the proposed system can considerably improve the compression performance of CS-based image coding. Simulation results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional one without using gray transformation in terms of compression performance.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2021

The Physics of Fast Radio Bursts

In 2007, a very bright radio pulse was identified in the archival data of the Parkes Telescope in Australia, marking the beginning of a new research branch in astrophysics. In 2013, this kind of millisecond bursts with extremely high brightness temperature takes a unified name, fast radio burst (FRB). Over the first few years, FRBs seemed very mysterious because the sample of known events was limited. With the improvement of instruments over the last five years, hundreds of new FRBs have been discovered. The field is now undergoing a revolution and understanding of FRB has rapidly increased as new observational data increasingly accumulates. In this review, we will summarize the basic physics of FRBs and discuss the current research progress in this area. We have tried to cover a wide range of FRB topics, including the observational property, propagation effect, population study, radiation mechanism, source model, and application in cosmology. A framework based on the latest observational facts is now under construction. In the near future, this exciting field is expected to make significant breakthroughs.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Abrupt switching of the anomalous Hall effect by field-rotation in nonmagnetic ZrTe5

The Hall effect arises when time reversal symmetry is broken by either intrinsic magnetism or an external magnetic field. The latter contribution dominates in non-magnetic materials, in which the angular dependence of the Hall effect is typically a smooth cosine function because only the out-of-plane projection of the field generates the in-plane transverse motion of electrons. Here, we report the observation of an abrupt switching of the Hall effect by field rotation in a non-magnetic material, ZrTe5. The angular dependence of the Hall resistivity approaches a signum function, persisting down to an extremely low field of 0.03 T. By varying the carrier density of ZrTe5 over three orders of magnitude, we show that this singular behavior is due to the anomalous Hall effect generated by the ultra-dilute massive Dirac carriers in the quantum limit of Pauli paramagnetism when the Zeeman energy exceeds the Fermi energy. Our results elucidate the origin of the anomalous Hall effect in ZrTe5, arising owing to the spin-polarized massive Dirac electrons rather than the separation of Weyl nodes.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Direct measurement of ferroelectric polarization in a tunable semimetal

Ferroelectricity, the electrostatic counterpart to ferromagnetism, has long been thought to be incompatible with metallicity due to screening of electric dipoles and external electric fields by itinerant charges. Recent measurements, however, demonstrated signatures of ferroelectric switching in the electrical conductance of bilayers and trilayers of WTe$_2$, a semimetallic transition metal dichalcogenide with broken inversion symmetry. An especially promising aspect of this system is that the density of electrons and holes can be continuously tuned by an external gate voltage. This degree of freedom enables investigation of the interplay between ferroelectricity and free carriers, a previously unexplored regime. Here, we employ capacitive sensing in dual-gated mesoscopic devices of bilayer WTe$_2$ to directly measure the spontaneous polarization in the metallic state and quantify the effect of free carriers on the polarization in the conduction and valence bands, separately. We compare our results to a low-energy model for the electronic bands and identify the layer-polarized states that contribute to transport and polarization simultaneously. Bilayer WTe$_2$ is thus shown to be a canonical example of a ferroelectric metal and an ideal platform for exploring polar ordering, ferroelectric transitions, and applications in the presence of free carriers.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Interface-Induced Sign Reversal of the Anomalous Hall Effect in Magnetic Topological Insulator Heterostructures

The Berry phase picture provides important insights into the electronic properties of condensed matter systems. The intrinsic anomalous Hall (AH) effect can be understood as a consequence of non-zero Berry curvature in momentum space. The realization of the quantum anomalous Hall effect provided conclusive evidence for the intrinsic mechanism of the AH effect in magnetic topological insulators (TIs). Here we fabricated magnetic TI/TI heterostructures and found both the magnitude and sign of the AH effect in the magnetic TI layer can be altered by tuning the TI thickness and/or the electric gate voltage. The sign change of the AH effect with increasing TI thickness is attributed to the charge transfer across the TI and magnetic TI layers, consistent with first-principles calculations. By fabricating the magnetic TI/TI/magnetic TI sandwich heterostructures with different dopants, we created an artificial topological Hall (TH) effect-like feature in Hall traces. This artificial TH effect is induced by the superposition of two AH effects with opposite signs instead of the formation of chiral spin textures in the samples. Our study provides a new route to engineer the Berry curvature in magnetic topological materials that may lead to potential technological applications.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Quantum Oscillations in the Field-induced Ferromagnetic State of MnBi$_{2-x}$Sb$_{x}$Te$_{4}$

The intrinsic antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi$_{2}$Te$_{4}$ undergoes a metamagnetic transition in a c-axis magnetic field. It has been predicted that ferromagnetic MnBi$_{2}$Te$_{4}$ is an ideal Weyl semimetal with a single pair of Weyl nodes. Here we report measurements of quantum oscillations detected in the field-induced ferromagnetic phase of MnBi$_{2-x}$Sb$_{x}$Te$_{4}$, where Sb substitution tunes the majority carriers from electrons to holes. Single frequency Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations were observed in a wide range of Sb concentrations (0.54 $\leq$ x $\leq$ 1.21). The evolution of the oscillation frequency and the effective mass shows reasonable agreement with the Weyl semimetal band-structure of ferromagnetic MnBi$_{2}$Te$_{4}$ predicted by density functional calculations. Intriguingly, the quantum oscillation frequency shows a strong temperature dependence, indicating that the electronic structure sensitively depends on magnetism.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗