Recent years have witnessed a great interest in orbital-related electronics (also termed as orbitronics). In the current work, we present a first-principles density functional theory calculation on orbital magnetic moments, intrinsic orbital Hall effect, and ordinary magnetoconductivity effects in rhombohedral graphene multilayers. Our calculations suggest a giant orbital moment that arises from interatomic cycloid motion, reaching over 30 𝜇 𝐵 under an intermediate gate voltage. This leads to a valley polarization under an external magnetic field, as observed in recent experiments [T. Han et al., Nature (London) 623, 41 (2023)]. In addition, the orbital-related transport feature exhibits significant responses that are potentially observed in experiments. We also suggest that under a periodically driven field (such as a high frequency light field), the ungated graphene multilayers could host strong quantum anomalous and orbital Hall effects, engineered by the layer number. As the graphene multilayers are intrinsically nonmagnetic with negligible spin-orbit coupling, the orbital moments will not be entangled by spin-related signals. Thus, they serve as an ideal platform to conduct orbitronic measurements and utilization for next generation information read/write nanodevices.

Link：Valley-dependent giant orbital moments and transport features in rhombohedral graphene multilayers | Phys. Rev. B