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Using magnetic proximity effect to break inversion symmetry
发布者: 周健 | 2023-01-04 | 15040

Symmetry lies at the heart of modern physical and material studies. While breaking inversion symmetry could trigger tremendous intriguing physical feature, such an approach is usually made by adding dopings, impurities, coherent motions, electric bias, etc. In the current study, we prove that antiferromagnetic proximity effect could also break the inversion symmetry of an otherwise symmetric van der Waals layer. In order to quantitively evaluate this noncontacting scheme, we scrutinize the bulk photovoltaic effect that strongly relies on the centrosymmetry. Using a prototypical system that has been heavily investigated recently, namely, MnBi2Te4/(Bi2Te3)n/MnBi2Te4 superlattice, we use our home-built nonlinear optical theory code to calculate its photo-current and photo-spin current generations. Colossal photoconductivity has been disclosed. In addition, we perform detailed symmetry constraints and group theory analysis to further verify our approach. See our paper (mainly by Ms. Xingchi Mu, Ms. Qianqian Xue, and Ms. Yan Sun) at Phys. Rev. Research, https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.013001.