The shift photovoltaic current and magnetically-induced bulk photocurrent in piezoelectric sillenite crystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the magneto-photovoltaic effects in piezoelectric sillenite crystals, demonstrating that magnetic fields significantly influence photovoltaic currents and enabling their separation and analysis.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence of magneto-photovoltaic currents in Bi12SiO20 and discusses their impact on photovoltaic current measurements in piezoelectric sillenite crystals.

Findings

Magneto-photovoltaic current is a significant part of the measured Hall current.

Photovoltaic currents can be influenced and partially separated using magnetic fields.

Experimental conditions affect the relative contributions of different photovoltaic components.

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown how shift and ballistic currents in piezoelectric sillenite crystals Bi$_{12}$GeO$_{20}$ and Bi$_{12}$SiO$_{20}$ can be separated experimentally under the assumption that the shift component of the circular current is small. However, it has been claimed that the shift and ballistic currents cannot be quantified by this method, due to the magneto-photovoltaic effect caused either by the change of the crystal's spatial symmetry in the magnetic field or by the breaking of time-reversal symmetry. Presently, we report observations of photovoltaic currents in Bi$_{12}$SiO$_{20}$, excited by linearly- and circularly-polarized light under weak external magnetic field, as well as measurements of the corresponding photo-Hall signals. We demonstrate that the magneto-photovoltaic current constitutes a significant fraction of the measured current in the Hall direction for Bi$_{12}$SiO$_{20}$ under specific experimental conditions.