English

Voltage-Controlled Magnetic Reversal in Orbital Chern Insulators

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-12-11 v6 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

Chern insulator ferromagnets are characterized by a quantized anomalous Hall effect, and have so far been identified experimentally in magnetically-doped topological insulator (MTI) thin films and in bilayer graphene moir{\'e} superlattices. We classify Chern insulator ferromagnets as either spin or orbital, depending on whether the orbital magnetization results from spontaneous spin-polarization combined with spin-orbit interactions, as in the MTI case, or directly from spontaneous orbital currents, as in the moir{\'e} superlattice case. We argue that in a given magnetic state, characterized for example by the sign of the anomalous Hall effect, the magnetization of an orbital Chern insulator will often have opposite signs for weak nn and weak pp electrostatic or chemical doping. This property enables pure electrical switching of a magnetic state in the presence of a fixed magnetic field.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.05084,
  title  = {Voltage-Controlled Magnetic Reversal in Orbital Chern Insulators},
  author = {Jihang Zhu and Jung-Jung Su and Allan H. MacDonald},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.05084},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

11 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:11:28.628Z