Tunable Topology and Berry Curvature Dipole in Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Janus Monolayers

TL;DR

This paper investigates Janus transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers, revealing their large Berry curvature dipoles and potential for non-linear Hall effects, despite being topologically trivial, through first-principles and theoretical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces Janus monolayers as new platforms with large Berry curvature dipoles, expanding the understanding of their electronic properties and potential applications.

Findings

WSeTe and WSTe are topologically trivial unlike WTe₂.

Janus monolayers exhibit large Berry curvature dipoles.

A low-energy massive Dirac model explains the observed phenomena.

Abstract

Janus transition metal dichalcogenides, with intrinsic mirror asymmetry, exhibit a wide array of interesting properties. In this work, we study Janus monolayers derived from WTe$_2$ using first-principles and tight-binding calculations. We discover that WSeTe and WSTe are topologically trivial, in contrast to the parent quantum spin Hall insulator WTe$_2$. Motivated by the growing interest in non-linear Hall effect, which also requires asymmetric structures, we investigate the Berry curvature and its dipole in these Janus systems and find that they exhibit strikingly large values of Berry curvature dipole, despite being in the topologically trivial phase. We track down the origin of this behaviour and put forth a low-energy massive Dirac model to understand the central features of our ab initio computations. Our predictions introduce Janus monolayers as promising new platforms for exploring as well as engineering non-linear Hall effect.