Strain-Engineered Nonlinear Hall Effect in HgTe

Abstract

As paradigmatic phenomena, Hall effects have inspired tremendous studies of symmetry and topology in condensed matter physics. Intriguingly, a second-order nonlinear Hall effect was recently proposed in noncentrosymmetric materials even in the presence of time-reversal symmetry. This effect originates from the Berry curvature dipole of electronic band structures and was predicted in Dirac and Weyl materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides and Weyl semimetals. Although it has been experimentally verified in some transition metal dichalcogenides, no obvious observation of such effects has been reported in Weyl semimetals. Taking advantage of the ideal Weyl phase with no coexisting trivial bands at the Fermi level, we use strained HgTe as a concrete example to show that the ideal Weyl semimetal is a promising platform for demonstrating the nonlinear Hall effect. Based on numerical calculations of the Berry curvature dipole, it was found that the magnitude of nonlinear Hall effect can be simply engineered by in-plane strain. Our work provides a versatile platform with high tunability, which could greatly facilitate the study of nonlinear Hall effect in three-dimensional topological materials.