Engineering topics
Shen, Huitao
Publications and source records attributed to Shen, Huitao.
Observation of the nonlinear Hall effect under time-reversal-symmetric conditions
The electrical Hall effect is the production, upon the application of an electric field, of a transverse voltage under an out-of-plane magnetic field. Studies of the Hall effect have led to important breakthroughs, including the discoveries of Berry curvature and topological Chern invariants1,2. The internal magnetization of magnets means that the electrical Hall effect can occur in the absence of an external magnetic field2; this ‘anomalous’ Hall effect is important for the study of quantum magnets2,3,4,5,6,7. The electrical Hall effect has rarely been studied in non-magnetic materials without external magnetic fields, owing to the constraint of time-reversal symmetry. However, only in the linear response regime—when the Hall voltage is linearly proportional to the external electric field—does the Hall effect identically vanish as a result of time-reversal symmetry; the Hall effect in the nonlinear response regime is not subject to such symmetry constraints8,9,10. Here we report observations of the nonlinear Hall effect10 in electrical transport in bilayers of the non-magnetic quantum material WTe2 under time-reversal-symmetric conditions. We show that an electric current in bilayer WTe2 leads to a nonlinear Hall voltage in the absence of a magnetic field. The properties of this nonlinear Hall effect are distinct from those of the anomalous Hall effect in metals: the nonlinear Hall effect results in a quadratic, rather than linear, current–voltage characteristic and, in contrast to the anomalous Hall effect, the nonlinear Hall effect results in a much larger transverse than longitudinal voltage response, leading to a nonlinear Hall angle (the angle between the total voltage response and the applied electric field) of nearly 90 degrees. We further show that the nonlinear Hall effect provides a direct measure of the dipole moment10 of the Berry curvature, which arises from layer-polarized Dirac fermions in bilayer WTe2. Our results demonstrate a new type of Hall effect and provide a way of detecting Berry curvature in non-magnetic quantum materials.
Quantum Oscillation from In-Gap States and a Non-Hermitian Landau Level Problem
Motivated by recent experiments on Kondo insulators, we theoretically study quantum oscillations from disorder-induced in-gap states in small-gap insulators. By solving a non-Hermitian Landau level problem that incorporates the imaginary part of electron’s self-energy, we show that the oscillation period is determined by the Fermi surface area in the absence of the hybridization gap, and we derive an analytical formula for the oscillation amplitude as a function of the indirect band gap, scattering rates, and temperature. Over a wide parameter range, we find that the effective mass is controlled by scattering rates, while the Dingle factor is controlled by the indirect band gap. We also show the important effect of scattering rates in reshaping the quasiparticle dispersion in connection with angle-resolved photoemission measurements on heavy fermion materials.
Electrically switchable Berry curvature dipole in the monolayer topological insulator WTe2
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Topological Band Theory for Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
We develop the topological band theory for systems described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, whose energy spectra are generally complex. After generalizing the notion of gapped band structures to the non-Hermitian case, we classify “gapped” bands in one and two dimensions by explicitly finding their topological invariants. We find nontrivial generalizations of the Chern number in two dimensions, and a new classification in one dimension, whose topology is determined by the energy dispersion rather than the energy eigenstates. We then study the bulk-edge correspondence and the topological phase transition in two dimensions. Different from the Hermitian case, the transition generically involves an extended intermediate phase with complex-energy band degeneracies at isolated “exceptional points” in momentum space. Lastly, we also systematically classify all types of band degeneracies.
Self-learning Monte Carlo method: Continuous-time algorithm
The recently introduced self-learning Monte Carlo method is a general-purpose numerical method that speeds up Monte Carlo simulations by training an effective model to propose uncorrelated configurations in the Markov chain. We implement this method in the framework of a continuous-time Monte Carlo method with an auxiliary field in quantum impurity models. We introduce and train a diagram generating function (DGF) to model the probability distribution of auxiliary field configurations in continuous imaginary time, at all orders of diagrammatic expansion. Furthermore, by using DGF to propose global moves in configuration space, we show that the self-learning continuous-time Monte Carlo method can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the simulation.