Excitons are fundamental quasiparticles that are ubiquitous in photoexcited semiconductors and insulators. Despite causing a sharp and strong photoabsorption near the interband absorption edge, charge-neutral excitons do not yield photocurrent in conventional photovoltaic processes unless dissociated into free charge carriers. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that excitons can directly contribute to photocurrent generation through a nonlinear light-matter interaction in a noncentrosymmetric semiconductor CuI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Hall effect of topological quantum materials often reveals essential new physics and possesses potential for application. The magnetic Weyl semimetal is one especially interesting example that hosts an interplay between the spontaneous time-reversal symmetry-breaking topology and the external magnetic field. However, it is less known beyond the anomalous Hall effect thereof, which is unable to account for plenty of magnetotransport measurements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNonlinear transport phenomena in condensed matter reflect the geometric nature, quantum coherence, and many-body correlation of electronic states. Electric currents in solids are classified into (i) ohmic current, (ii) supercurrent, and (iii) geometric or topological current. While the nonlinear current-voltage (-) characteristics of the former two categories have been extensive research topics recently, those of the last category remains unexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2024
The Majorana fermion offers fascinating possibilities such as non-Abelian statistics and nonlocal robust qubits, and hunting it is one of the most important topics in current condensed matter physics. Most of the efforts have been focused on the Majorana bound state at zero energy in terms of scanning tunneling spectroscopy searching for the quantized conductance. On the other hand, a chiral Majorana edge channel appears at the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator when engineering an interface between proximity-induced superconductivity and ferromagnetism.
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