Optical activation of nonlinear Hall effect in topological insulators with warped Fermi surface
Abstract
Topological insulators (TIs) with hexagonally warped Fermi surface are natural platforms for the nonlinear Hall effect, as warping breaks inversion symmetry while preserving time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Here we show that this inversion breaking alone is insufficient: although warping generates a strongly anisotropic Berry curvature, the preserved threefold rotational symmetry forces the equilibrium Berry curvature dipole (BCD) to vanish identically. We demonstrate that linearly polarized light removes this symmetry obstruction: in the off-resonant Floquet regime, it lowers the rotational symmetry while preserving TRS, thereby generating a finite BCD whose magnitude, orientation, and sign are continuously tunable by the light intensity and polarization. For realistic Bi2Te3 parameters, we show that the induced BCD reaches ∼0.03~nm, yielding microampere-scale nonlinear Hall currents under experimentally accessible conditions. Our results therefore establish Floquet symmetry engineering as a route to activating the symmetry-forbidden nonlinear transport on TI surfaces without breaking the TRS.
Related
- Nonlinear Hall Effect in Altermagnetic Warped Topological Insulators
- Nanofabrication of Topological Surface Relief Structures in Azopolymers With Tightly Focused Optical Skyrmions
- Helicity-engineered nonlinear optical responses in photo-excited topological semimetals
- Observation of topological surface phonons in diamond with nonlinear optics
- Nonlinearity-Induced Suppression of Dissipation in Bath-Coupled Floquet Topological Insulators
BibTeX
@misc{shafiei2026optical,
title = {{Optical activation of nonlinear Hall effect in topological insulators with warped Fermi surface}},
author = {Mohammad Shafiei and Farhad Fazileh and Milorad V. Milošević},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.15460},
eprint = {2609.15460},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15460},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Optical activation of nonlinear Hall effect in topological insulators with warped Fermi surface
AU - Mohammad Shafiei
AU - Farhad Fazileh
AU - Milorad V. Milošević
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.15460
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15460
AB - Topological insulators (TIs) with hexagonally warped Fermi surface are natural platforms for the nonlinear Hall effect, as warping breaks inversion symmetry while preserving time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Here we show that this inversion breaking alone is insufficient: although warping generates a strongly anisotropic Berry curvature, the preserved threefold rotational symmetry forces the equilibrium Berry curvature dipole (BCD) to vanish identically. We demonstrate that linearly polarized light removes this symmetry obstruction: in the off-resonant Floquet regime, it lowers the rotational symmetry while preserving TRS, thereby generating a finite BCD whose magnitude, orientation, and sign are continuously tunable by the light intensity and polarization. For realistic Bi_2Te_3 parameters, we show that the induced BCD reaches ∼0.03~nm, yielding microampere-scale nonlinear Hall currents under experimentally accessible conditions. Our results therefore establish Floquet symmetry engineering as a route to activating the symmetry-forbidden nonlinear transport on TI surfaces without breaking the TRS.
ER -