Interlayer Electric Multipoles Induced by In-Plane Field from Quantum Geometric Origins.

We show that interlayer charge transfer in 2D materials can be driven by an in-plane electric field, giving rise to electrical multipole generation in linear and second order in-plane field. The linear and nonlinear effects have quantum geometric origins in the Berry curvature and quantum metric, respectively, defined in extended parameter spaces characteristic of layered materials. We elucidate their symmetry characters and demonstrate sizable dipole and quadrupole polarizations, respectively, in twisted bilayers and trilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides. Furthermore, we show that this effect is strongly enhanced during the topological phase transition tuned by interlayer translation. The effects point to a new electric control on the layer quantum degree of freedom.

Topological Flat Bands in Strained Graphene: Substrate Engineering and Optical Control.

The discovery of correlated phases in twisted moiré superlattices accelerated the search for low-dimensional materials with exotic properties. A promising approach uses engineered substrates to strain the material. However, designing substrates for tailored properties is hindered by the incomplete understanding of the relationship between the substrate's shapes and the electronic properties of the deposited materials. By analyzing effective models of graphene under periodic deformations with generic crystalline profiles, we identify strong C2z symmetry breaking as the critical substrate geometric feature for emerging energy gaps and quasi-flat bands. We find continuous strain profiles producing connected pseudomagnetic field landscapes are important for band topology. We show that the resultant electronic and topological properties from a substrate can be controlled with circularly polarized light, which also offers unique signatures for identifying the band topology imprinted by strain. Our results can guide experiments on strain engineering for exploring interesting transport and topological phenomena.

Time-reversal even charge hall effect from twisted interface coupling.

Under time-reversal symmetry, a linear charge Hall response is usually deemed to be forbidden by the Onsager relation. In this work, we discover a scenario for realizing a time-reversal even linear charge Hall effect in a non-isolated two-dimensional crystal allowed by time reversal symmetry. The restriction by Onsager relation is lifted by interfacial coupling with an adjacent layer, where the overall chiral symmetry requirement is fulfilled by a twisted stacking. We reveal the underlying band geometric quantity as the momentum-space vorticity of layer current. The effect is demonstrated in twisted bilayer graphene and twisted homobilayer transition metal dichalcogenides with a wide range of twist angles, which exhibit giant Hall ratios under experimentally practical conditions, with gate voltage controlled on-off switch. This work reveals intriguing Hall physics in chiral structures, and opens up a research direction of layertronics that exploits the quantum nature of layer degree of freedom to uncover exciting effects.

Single Photon Emitters with Polarization and Orbital Angular Momentum Locking in Monolayer Semiconductors.

Excitons in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide are endowed with intrinsic valley-orbit coupling between their center-of-mass motion and valley pseudospin. When trapped in a confinement potential, e.g., generated by strain field, we find that intralayer excitons are valley and orbital angular momentum (OAM) entangled. By tuning the trap profile and external magnetic field, one can engineer the exciton states at the ground state and realize a series of valley-OAM entangled states. We further show that the OAM of excitons can be transferred to emitted photons, and these novel exciton states can naturally serve as polarization-OAM locked single photon emitters, which under certain circumstance become polarization-OAM entangled, highly tunable by strain trap and magnetic field. Our proposal demonstrates a novel scheme to generate polarization-OAM locked/entangled photons at the nanoscale with a high degree of integrability and tunability, pointing to exciting opportunities for quantum information applications.

Anomalous Magneto-Optical Response and Chiral Interface of Dipolar Excitons at Twisted Valleys.

An anomalous magneto-optical spectrum is discovered for dipolar valley excitons in twisted double-layer transition metal dichalcogenides, where the in-plane magnetic field induces a sizable multiplet splitting of exciton states inside the light cone. Chiral dispersions of the split branches make possible an efficient optical injection of the unidirectional exciton current. We also find an analog effect with a modest heterostrain replacing the magnetic field for introducing large splitting and chiral dispersions in the light cone. Angular orientation of the photoinjected exciton flow can be controlled by strain, with left-right unidirectionality selected by circular polarization.

Layer Pseudospin Dynamics and Genuine Non-Abelian Berry Phase in Inhomogeneously Strained Moiré Pattern.

Periodicity of long wavelength moiré patterns is very often destroyed by the inhomogeneous strain introduced in fabrications of van der Waals layered structures. We present a framework to describe massive Dirac fermions in such distorted moiré pattern of transition metal dichalcogenides homobilayers, accounting for the dynamics of layer pseudospin. In decoupled bilayers, we show two causes of in-plane layer pseudospin precession: By the coupling of layer antisymmetric strain to valley magnetic moment; and by the Aharonov-Bohm effect in the SU(2) gauge potential for the case of R-type bilayer under antisymmetric strain and H-type under symmetric strain. With interlayer coupling in the moiré, its interplay with strain manifests as a non-Abelian gauge field. We show a genuine non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm effect in such field, where the evolution operators for different loops are noncommutative. This provides an exciting platform to explore non-Abelian gauge field effects on electron, with remarkable tunability of the field by strain and interlayer bias.

Tuning the Pseudospin Polarization of Graphene by a Pseudomagnetic Field.

One of the intriguing characteristics of honeycomb lattices is the appearance of a pseudomagnetic field as a result of mechanical deformation. In the case of graphene, the Landau quantization resulting from this pseudomagnetic field has been measured using scanning tunneling microscopy. Here we show that a signature of the pseudomagnetic field is a local sublattice symmetry breaking observable as a redistribution of the local density of states. This can be interpreted as a polarization of graphene's pseudospin due to a strain induced pseudomagnetic field, in analogy to the alignment of a real spin in a magnetic field. We reveal this sublattice symmetry breaking by tunably straining graphene using the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. The tip locally lifts the graphene membrane from a SiO2 support, as visible by an increased slope of the I(z) curves. The amount of lifting is consistent with molecular dynamics calculations, which reveal a deformed graphene area under the tip in the shape of a Gaussian. The pseudomagnetic field induced by the deformation becomes visible as a sublattice symmetry breaking which scales with the lifting height of the strained deformation and therefore with the pseudomagnetic field strength. Its magnitude is quantitatively reproduced by analytic and tight-binding models, revealing fields of 1000 T. These results might be the starting point for an effective THz valley filter, as a basic element of valleytronics.

Plasmonic polymers with strong chiroptical response for sensing molecular chirality.

We report on the chiroptical transfer and amplification effect observed in plasmonic polymers consisting of achiral gold nanorod monomers linked by cysteine chiral molecules in an end-to-end fashion. A new strategy for controlling the hot spots based circular dichroism (CD)-active sites in plasmonic polymers was developed to realize tailored and reproducible chiroptical activity in a controlled way. We showed that by regulating the bond angles between adjacent nanorods and the degree of polymerization in the linear plasmonic polymer, weak molecular chirality in the ultraviolet spectral region can be amplified by more than two orders of magnitude via the induced CD response in the visible/near infrared region. We demonstrate that this plasmonic polymer can be used to provide not only the Raman "fingerprint" information for identifying the molecular identity but also the CD signatures for (i) resolving the enantiomeric pairs of cysteine molecules at a small quantity level, and (ii) quantifying the enantiomeric purity of the chiral analytes. Chiral analyses by chiroptically responsive plasmonic polymers may find important applications in bioscience and biomedicine.

Giant optical activity from the radiative electromagnetic interactions in plasmonic nanoantennas.

We fabricate the linear chains of twisted gold nanorods by a facile chiral molecular templating method. In such a chiral plasmonic system, particle-particle separation distances are in the order of the light wavelength and are much larger than the sizes of individual particles. As a result, the inter-particle interactions in this chiral system are mediated mainly by a relatively weak far-field plasmonic coupling, rather than a strong near-field coupling. However, such a chiral system of twisted gold nanorods show a huge surface plasmon based circular dichroism response, with the highest anisotropy factor around 0.027. This is in contrast to the previous studies in which near-field plasmonic coupling is an indispensable prerequisite to obtain strong optical activity from a chiral plasmonic nanostructure. Our study demonstrates here an alternative strategy for achieving huge chiroptical response of a chiral plasmonic nanostructure based on far-field, radiative electromagnetic interactions of metallic nanoparticles. Theoretical simulations show a satisfactory agreement with the experimental results. This study may provide more flexible ways to design chiral plasmon nanostructures with strong CD responses for various applications.

Protective effect of 4-methoxy-5-hydroxycanthin-6-one, a natural alkaloid, on dextran sulfate sodium-induced rat colitis.

In the present study, we evaluated the effect of 4-methoxy-5-hydroxycanthin-6-one (CAN), a natural alkaloid isolated from Picrasma quassioides (D.Don) Benn., on ulcerative colitis induced by dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) in rats in comparison with the positive control drug, sulfasalazine (SASP). Given orally for several days, CAN significantly reduced the severity of colitis and mitigated changes in colon length, colon mucosa myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity, and the level of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) in serum. The effect of CAN was similar to that of SASP. These results suggest that CAN treatment might be an effective therapeutic intervention against ulcerative colitis induced by DSS.