Optical valley separation in two-dimensional semimetals with tilted Dirac cones

Two-dimensional semimetals with tilted Dirac cones in the electronic band structure are shown to exhibit spatial separation of carriers belonging to different valleys under illumination. In stark contrast to gapped Dirac materials this optovalleytronic phenomenon occurs in systems with intact inversion and time-reversal symmetry that host massless Dirac cones in the band structure, thereby retaining the exceptional graphene-like transport properties. As a result we demonstrate that optical valley separation is possible at arbitrarily low photon frequencies including the deep infrared and terahertz regimes with full gate tunability via Pauli blocking. As a specific example of our theory, we demonstrate tunable valley separation in the proposed two-dimensional tilted Dirac cone semimetal 8-$Pmmn$ borophene for incident infrared photons at room temperature.
Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures