No Arabic abstract
Topological Insulators are the best thermoelectric materials involving a sophisticated physics beyond their solid state and electronic structure. We show that exists a topological contribution to the thermoelectric effect that arise between topological and thermal quantum field theories applied at very low energies. This formalism provides us with a quantized topological mass proportional to the temperature T, being both quantities directly related with an electric potential V and getting a Seebeck coefficient where we identify an anomalous contribution that we associate to the creation of real electron-hole Schwingers pairs close to the topological bands. Finally, we find a general expression, considering the electronic contribution, for the dimensionless figure of merit of these topological materials, getting a value of 2.73 that is applicable to the Bi$_2$Te$_3$, for which it was reported a value of 2.4, using only the most basic topological numbers (0 or 1).
Topological edge states are predicted to be responsible for the high efficient thermoelectric response of topological insulators, currently the best thermoelectric materials. However, to explain their figure of merit the coexistence of topological electrons, entropy and phonons can not be considered independently. In a background that puts together electrodynamics and topology, through an expression for the topological intrinsic field, we treat relativistic phonons within the topological surface showing their ability to modulate the Berry curvature of the bands and then playing a fundamental role in the thermoelectric effect. Finally, we show how the topological insulators under such relativistic thermal excitations keep time reversal symmetry allowing the observation of high figures of merit at high temperatures. The emergence of this new intrinsic topological field and other constraints are suitable to have experimental consequences opening new possibilities of improving the efficiency of this topological effect for their based technology.
A prominent feature of topological insulators (TIs) is the surface states comprising of spin-nondegenerate massless Dirac fermions. Recent technical advances have made it possible to address the surface transport properties of TI thin films while tuning the Fermi levels of both top and bottom surfaces across the Dirac point by electrostatic gating. This opened the window for studying the spin-nondegenerate Dirac physics peculiar to TIs. Here we report our discovery of a novel planar Hall effect (PHE) from the TI surface, which results from a hitherto-unknown resistivity anisotropy induced by an in-plane magnetic field. This effect is observed in dual-gated devices of bulk-insulating Bi$_{2-x}$Sb$_{x}$Te$_{3}$ thin films, in which both top and bottom surfaces are gated. The origin of PHE is the peculiar time-reversal-breaking effect of an in-plane magnetic field, which anisotropically lifts the protection of surface Dirac fermions from back-scattering. The key signature of the field-induced anisotropy is a strong dependence on the gate voltage with a characteristic two-peak structure near the Dirac point which is explained theoretically using a self-consistent T-matrix approximation. The observed PHE provides a new tool to analyze and manipulate the topological protection of the TI surface in future experiments.
We theoretically study the magnetoresistance (MR) of two-dimensional massless Dirac electrons as found on the surface of three-dimensional topological insulators (3D TIs) that is capped by a ferromagnetic insulator (FI). We calculate charge and spin transport by Kubo and Boltzmann theories, taking into account the ladder-vertex correction and the in-scattering due to normal and magnetic disorder. The induced exchange splitting is found to generate an electric conductivity that depends on the magnetization orientation, but its form is very different from both the anisotropic and spin Hall MR. The in-plane MR vanishes identically for non-magnetic disorder, while out-of-plane magnetizations cause a large MR ratio. On the other hand, we do find an in-plane MR and planar Hall effect in the presence of magnetic disorder aligned with the FI magnetization. Our results may help understand recent transport measurements on TI|FI systems.
Two-dimensional magnetic insulators can be promising hosts for topological magnons. In this study, we show that ABC-stacked honeycomb lattice multilayers with alternating Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) reveal a rich topological magnon phase diagram. Based on our bandstructure and Berry curvature calculations, we demonstrate jumps in the thermal Hall behavior that corroborate with topological phase transitions triggered by adjusting the DMI and interlayer coupling. We connect the phase diagram of generic multilayers to a bilayer and a trilayer system. We find an even-odd effect amongst the multilayers where the even layers show no jump in thermal Hall conductivity, but the odd layers do. We also observe the presence of topological proximity effect in our trilayer. Our results offer new schemes to manipulate Chern numbers and their measurable effects in topological magnonic systems.
We present a theoretical investigation of electron states hosted by magnetic domain walls on the 3D topological insulator surface. The consideration includes the domain walls with distinct vectorial and spatial textures. The study is carried out on the basis of the Hamiltonian for quasi-relativistic fermions by using a continual approach and tight-binding calculations. We derive the spectral characteristics and spatial localization of the the one-dimensional low-energy states appearing at the domain walls. The antiphase domain walls are shown to generate the topologically protected chiral states with linear dispersion, the group velocity and spin-polarization direction of which depend on an easy axis orientation. In the case of an easy plane anisotropy, we predict a realization of a dispersionless state, flat band in the energy spectrum, that is spin-polarized along the surface normal. Modification of the surface states in the multi-domain case, which is approximated by a periodic set of domain walls, is described as well. We find that the magnetic domain walls with complex internal texture, such as Neel-like or Bloch-like walls, also host the topological states, although their spectrum and spin structure can be changed compared with the sharp wall case.