Giant nonlinear Hall effect in twisted WSe$_2$

Abstract

The recently discovered nonlinear Hall effect (NHE) in a few non-interacting systems provides a novel mechanism to generate second harmonic electrical Hall signals under time-reversal-symmetric conditions. Here, we introduce a new approach to engineering NHE by using twisted moiré structures. We find that the twisted WSe$_2$ bilayer exhibits a NHE when tuning the Fermi level to the moiré flat bands. Near half-filling of the first moiré band, the nonlinear Hall signal shows a sharp peak with the generation efficiency at least two orders of magnitude larger than those in previous experiments. We propose that the giant NHE and diverging generation efficiency originate from a mass-diverging type continuous Mott transition, which is evidenced by resistivity measurements. This work demonstrates not only how interaction effects can couple to Berry curvature dipoles to produce novel quantum phenomena, but also what NHE measurements can provide for developing a new tool to study the quantum criticality.