Interlayer electric multipole Hall effect in twisted multilayers

Abstract

Electrons in layered van der Waals materials possess a layer pseudospin characterizing their wave-function distribution among layers. In twisted structures, this pseudospin forms nontrivial textures, leading to intriguing phenomena such as the layer Hall effect (LHE), where distinct layer Hall currents flow despite the presence of time-reversal symmetry. In chiral bilayers, LHE manifests as an interlayer electric dipole Hall effect with Hall counterflows and a concomitant in-plane magnetic dipole. Multilayers host richer layer-dependent Hall currents, generating interlayer electric multipole Hall effects and in-plane magnetic multipoles. We start from exploring the interlayer electric quadrupole Hall effect in mirror-symmetric twisted trilayers. At small twist angles, interlayer translation efficiently tunes layer Hall current magnitudes. At large angles and low doping, the currents can be well accounted for by adding the contributions from the two individual twisted interfaces. This decomposition allows obtaining layer-resolved Hall currents in large-angle twisted multilayers even without well-defined periodicity.