Orbital Inverse Faraday and Cotton-Mouton Effects in Hall Fluids
Abstract
We report two light-induced orbital magnetization effects in quantum Hall (QH) fluids, stemming from their transverse response. The first is a purely transverse contribution to the inverse Faraday effect (IFE), where circularly polarized light induces a DC magnetization by stirring the charged fluid. This contribution dominates the IFE in the QH regime. The second is the orbital inverse Cotton-Mouton effect (ICME), in which linearly polarized light generates a DC magnetization. Since the applied field in the ICME does not break time-reversal symmetry, the induced magnetization directly probes the chiral orbital response of the fluid at the driving frequency. We estimate that the resulting magnetization lies in the range of 0.5-10 Bohr magnetons per charge carrier in materials such as graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) in the QH regime. Finally, we show that the induced magnetization is accompanied by a local correction to the static particle density, enabling optical quantum printing of density profiles into the QH fluid.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.01946,
title = {Orbital Inverse Faraday and Cotton-Mouton Effects in Hall Fluids},
author = {Gabriel Cardoso and Erlend Syljuåsen and Alexander V. Balatsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01946},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
5 + 9 pages