In some van der Waals materials, electrons can gather in one 'valley' of the band structure, but such valley-polarised states are hard to detect. Theorists in QMAT's Condensed Matter Theory group at the University of Jyväskylä predict two measurable signatures in junctions between Ising superconductors and materials hosting these states: a thermoelectric effect and current rectification.

Both arise from the interplay of Ising spin–orbit coupling, spin splitting from an exchange or Zeeman field, and valley polarisation. The effects could serve as experimental probes in heterostructures such as few-layer transition metal dichalcogenides and twisted bilayer or rhombohedral graphene. The authors are Oladunjoye Awoga, Pauli Virtanen, Tero Heikkilä and Stefan Ilić.

The preprint has not yet been peer reviewed.

Image: QMAT