Valley Pumping via Edge States and the Nonlocal Valley Hall Effect in Two-Dimensional Semiconductors

Abstract: Recent experiments have studied the temperature and gate voltage dependence of nonlocal transport in bilayer graphene, identifying features thought to be associated with the two-dimensional semiconductor's bulk intrinsic valley Hall effect. Here, we use both simple microscopic tight-binding ribbon models and phenomenological bulk transport equations to emphasize the impact of sample edges on the nonlocal voltage signals. We show that the nonlocal valley Hall response is sensitive to electronic structure details at the sample edges, and that it is enhanced when the local longitudinal conductivity is larger near the sample edges than in the bulk. We discuss recent experiments in light of these findings and also discuss the close analogy between electron pumping between valleys near two-dimensional sample edges in the valley Hall effect, and bulk pumping between valleys due to the chiral anomaly in three-dimensional topological semimetals.