Electrical tuning of valley magnetic moment through symmetry control in bilayer MoS2

Abstract

Electric fields can break the structural inversion symmetry in bilayer 2D materials, providing a way of tuning the magnetic moment and Berry curvature. This effect can be probed directly in bilayer MoS2 using optical measurements. Crystal symmetry governs the nature of electronic Bloch states. For example, in the presence of time-reversal symmetry, the orbital magnetic moment and Berry curvature of the Bloch states must vanish unless inversion symmetry is broken1. In certain two-dimensional electron systems such as bilayer graphene, the intrinsic inversion symmetry can be broken simply by applying a perpendicular electric field2,3. In principle, this offers the possibility of switching on/off and continuously tuning the magnetic moment and Berry curvature near the Dirac valleys by reversible electrical control4,5. Here we investigate this possibility using polarization-resolved photoluminescence of bilayer MoS2, which has the same symmetry as bilayer graphene but has a bandgap in the visible spectrum6,7 allowing direct optical probing5,8,9,10,11,12. We find that in bilayer MoS2 the circularly polarized photoluminescence can be continuously tuned from −15% to 15% as a function of gate voltage, whereas in structurally non-centrosymmetric monolayer MoS2 the photoluminescence polarization is gate independent. The observations are well explained as resulting from the continuous variation of orbital magnetic moments between positive and negative values through symmetry control.