We propose an experimental scheme to probe the Berry curvature of solids. Our method is sensitive to arbitrary regions of the Brillouin zone and employs only basic optical and terahertz techniques to yield a background-free signal. Using semiconductor quantum wells as a prototypical system, we discuss how to inject Berry curvature macroscopically and probe it in a way that provides information ...

In recent years it has become clear that electronic Berry curvature (BC) is a key concept to understand and predict physical properties of crystalline materials. A wealth interesting Hall-type responses in charge, spin heat transport are caused by the BC associated bands inside solid: anomalous Hall effects magnetic materials, various nonlinear Nernst non-magnetic systems lack inversion symmetr...

Topological energy bands have important geometrical properties described by the Berry curvature. We show that the Berry curvature changes the hydrodynamic equations of motion for a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate, and causes significant modifications to the collective mode frequencies. We illustrate our results for the case of two-dimensional Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a Zeeman field. Using...

Recent progress in wave packet dynamics based on the insight of Berry pertaining to adiabatic evolution of quantum systems has led to the need for a new property of a Bloch state, the Berry curvature, to be calculated from first principles. We report here on the response to this challenge by the ab initio community during the past decade. First we give a tutorial introduction of the conceptual...

Working with epitaxial films of Fe, we succeeded in independent control of different scattering processes in the anomalous Hall effect. The result appropriately accounted for the role of phonons, thereby clearly exposing the fundamental flaws of the standard plot of the anomalous Hall resistivity versus longitudinal resistivity. A new scaling has been thus established that allows an unambiguous...

M. Gradhand,1,4,* D. V. Fedorov,2 F. Pientka,2,3 P. Zahn,2 I. Mertig,1,2 and B. L. Györffy4 1Max-Planck-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik, Weinberg 2, D-06120 Halle, Germany 2Institut für Physik, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, D-06099 Halle, Germany 3Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems and Fachbereich Physik, Freie Universität Berlin, D-14195 Berlin, Germany 4H. H. Wills Physi...

Recent progress in wave packet dynamics based on the insight of M. V. Berry pertaining to adiabatic evolution of quantum systems has led to the need that a new property of a Bloch state, the Berry curvature, has to be calculated from first principles. We report here on the response to this challenge by the ab initio community during the past decade. First we give a tutorial introduction of the ...

By quantizing the semiclassical motion of excitons, we show that the Berry curvature can cause an energy splitting between exciton states with opposite angular momentum. This splitting is determined by the Berry curvature flux through the k-space area spanned by the relative motion of the electron-hole pair in the exciton wave function. Using the gapped two-dimensional Dirac equation as a model...

Photovoltaic Hall effect — the Hall effect induced by intense, circularly-polarized light in the absence of static magnetic fields — has been proposed in Phys. Rev. B 79, 081406R (2009) for graphene where a massless Dirac dispersion is realized. The photovoltaic Berry curvature (a nonequilibrium extension of the standard Berry curvature) is the key quantity to understand this effect, which appe...