Observation of strong excitonic magneto-chiral anisotropy in twisted bilayer van der Waals crystals. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The interplay between chirality and magnetism generates a distinct physical process, the magneto-chiral effect, which enables one to develop functionalities that cannot be achieved solely by any of the two. Such a process is universal with the breaking of parity-inversion and time-reversal symmetry simultaneously. However, the magneto-chiral effect observed so far is weak when the matter responds to photons, electrons, or phonons. Here we report the first observation of strong magneto-chiral response to excitons in a twisted bilayer tungsten disulfide with the amplitude of excitonic magneto-chiral (ExMCh) anisotropy reaches a value of ~4%. We further found the ExMCh anisotropy features with a spectral splitting of ~7nm, precisely the full-width at half maximum of the excitonic chirality spectrum. Without an externally applied strong magnetic field, the observed ExMCh effect with a spontaneous magnetic moment from the ferromagnetic substrate of thulium iron garnet at room temperature is favorable for device applications. The unique ExMCh processes provide a new pathway to actively control magneto-chiral applications in photochemical reactions, asymmetric synthesis, and drug delivery.

published proceedings

  • Nat Commun

altmetric score

  • 34.25

author list (cited authors)

  • Lan, S., Liu, X., Wang, S., Zhu, H., Liu, Y., Gong, C., ... Zhang, X.

citation count

  • 3

complete list of authors

  • Lan, Shoufeng||Liu, Xiaoze||Wang, Siqi||Zhu, Hanyu||Liu, Yawen||Gong, Cheng||Yang, Sui||Shi, Jing||Wang, Yuan||Zhang, Xiang

publication date

  • January 2021