Light-induced anomalous Hall effect in graphene

Many non-equilibrium phenomena have been discovered or predicted in optically driven quantum solids1. Examples include light-induced superconductivity2,3 and Floquet-engineered topological phases4–8. These are short-lived effects that should lead to measurable changes in electrical transport, which can be characterized using an ultrafast device architecture based on photoconductive switches9. Here, we report the observation of a light-induced anomalous Hall effect in monolayer graphene driven by a femtosecond pulse of circularly polarized light. The dependence of the effect on a gate potential used to tune the Fermi level reveals multiple features that reflect a Floquet-engineered topological band structure4,5, similar to the band structure originally proposed by Haldane10. This includes an approximately 60 meV wide conductance plateau centred at the Dirac point, where a gap of equal magnitude is predicted to open. We find that when the Fermi level lies within this plateau the estimated anomalous Hall conductance saturates around 1.8 ± 0.4 e2/h. A transient topological response in graphene is driven by a short pulse of light. When the Fermi energy is in the predicted band gap the Hall conductance is around two conductance quanta. An ultrafast detection technique enables the measurement.