English

Giant Faraday rotation induced by Berry phase in bilayer graphene under strong terahertz fields

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2014-04-17 v1

Abstract

High-order terahertz (THz) sideband generation (HSG) in semiconductors is a phenomenon with physics similar to high-order harmonic generation but in a much lower frequency regime. It was found that the electron-hole pairs excited by a weak optical laser can accumulate Berry phases along a cyclic path under the driving of a strong THz field. The Berry phases appear as the Faraday rotation angles of the emission signal under short-pulse excitation in monolayer MoS2_2. In this paper, the theory of Berry phase in THz extreme nonlinear optics is applied to biased bilayer graphene with Bernal stacking, which has similar Bloch band features and optical properties to the monolayer MoS2_2, such as time-reversal related valleys and valley contrasting optical selection rules. The bilayer graphene has much larger Berry curvature than monolayer MoS2_2, which leads to a giant Faraday rotation of the optical emission (\sim 1 rad for a THz field with frequency 1 THz and strength 8 kV/cm). This provides opportunities to use bilayer graphene and low-power THz lasers for ultrafast electro-optical devices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.7987,
  title  = {Giant Faraday rotation induced by Berry phase in bilayer graphene under strong terahertz fields},
  author = {Fan Yang and Xiaodong Xu and Ren-Bao Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.7987},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures