Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides have emerged as prominent candidates to explore the complex interplay between the spin and the valleys degrees of freedom. The strong spin-orbit interaction and broken inversion symmetry within these materials lead to the spin-valley locking effect, in which carriers occupying the K and K' valleys of the reciprocal space must have opposite spin depending on which valley they reside. This effect is particularly strong for holes due to a larger spin-orbit gap in the valence band. By reducing the dimensionality of a monolayer of tungsten diselenide to 1D via electrostatic confinement, we demonstrate that spin-valley locking in combination with strong hole-hole interactions lead to a ferromagnetic state in which hole transport through the 1D system is spin-valley polarized, even without an applied magnetic field, and that the persistence of this spin-valley polarized configuration can be tuned by a global back-gate. This observation opens the possibility of implementing a robust and stable valley polarized system, essential for valleytronic applications.
@article{arxiv.2410.11653,
title = {Valley-spin polarization at zero magnetic field induced by strong hole-hole interactions in monolayer WSe$_2$},
author = {Justin Boddison-Chouinard and Marek Korkusinski and Alex Bogan and Pedro Barrios and Philip Waldron and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Jarosław Pawłowski and Daniel Miravet and Pawel Hawrylak and Adina Luican-Mayer and Louis Gaudreau},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11653},
year = {2024}
}