Magnetic injection photocurrents in valley polarized states of twisted bilayer graphene

Abstract

Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene displays a complex phase diagram as a function of flat band filling, featuring compressibility cascade transitions and a variety of competing ground states with broken spin, valley and point group symmetries. Recent THz photocurrent spectroscopy experiments have shown a dependence on the filling which is not consistent with the simplest cascade picture of sequential filling of equivalent flat bands. In this work, we show that when time-reversal symmetry is broken due to valley polarization, a magnetic injection photocurrent develops which can be used to distinguish different spin-valley polarization scenarios. Using the topological heavy fermion model we compute both shift and injection currents as a function of filling and argue that current experiments can be used to determine the spontaneous valley polarization.