No Arabic abstract
The fabrication of bismuthene on top of SiC paved the way for substrate engineering of room temperature quantum spin Hall insulators made of group V atoms. We perform large-scale quantum transport calculations in these 2d materials to analyse the rich phenomenology that arises from the interplay between topology, disorder, valley and spin degrees of freedom. For this purpose, we consider a minimal multi-orbital real-space tight-binding hamiltonian and use a Chebyshev polynomial expansion technique. We discuss how the quantum spin Hall states are affected by disorder, sublattice resolved potential and Rashba spin-orbit coupling.
We study the effect of electron-electron interactions on the charge and spin structures of a Quantum Hall strip in a triangularly confined potential. We find that the strip undergoes a spin-unpolarized to spin-polarized transition as a function of magnetic field perpendicular to the strip. For sharp confinements the spin-polarization transition is spontaneous and first develops at the softer side of the triangular potential which shows up as an eye-structure in the electron dispersion. For sufficiently weak confinements this spin-polarization transition is preceded by a charge reconstruction of a single spin species, which creates a spin-polarized strip of electrons with a width of the order of the magnetic length detached from the rest of the system. Relevance of our findings to the recent momentum resolved tunneling experiments is also discussed.
We show that correlated two-particle backscattering can induce fractional charge oscillations in a quantum dot built at the edge of a two-dimensional topological insulator by means of magnetic barriers. The result nicely complements recent works where the fractional oscillations were obtained employing of semiclassical treatments. Moreover, since by rotating the magnetization of the barriers a fractional charge can be trapped in the dot via the Jackiw-Rebbi mechanism, the system we analyze offers the opportunity to study the interplay between this noninteracting charge fractionalization and the fractionalization due to two-particle backscattering. In this context, we demonstrate that the number of fractional oscillations of the charge density depends on the magnetization angle. Finally, we address the renormalization induced by two-particle backscattering on the spin density, which is characterized by a dominant oscillation, sensitive to the Jackiw-Rebbi charge, with a wavelength twice as large as the charge density oscillations.
We study the influence of step defect on surface states in three-dimensional topological insulators subject to a perpendicular magnetic field. By calculating the energy spectrum of the surface states, we find that Landau levels (LLs) can form on flat regions of the surface and are distant from the step defect, and several subbands emerge at side surface of the step defect. The subband which connects to the two zeroth LLs is spin-polarized and chiral. In particular, when the electron transports along the side surface, the electron spin direction can be manipulated arbitrarily by gate voltage. And no reflection occurs even if the electron spin direction is changed. This provides a fascinating avenue to control the electron spin easily and coherently. In addition, regarding the subbands with high LL index, there exist spin-momentum locking helical states and the quantum spin Hall effect can appear.
We show theoretically that both intrinsic spin Hall effect (SHE) and orbital Hall effect (OHE) can arise in centrosymmetric systems through momentum-space orbital texture, which is ubiquitous even in centrosymmetric systems unlike spin texture. OHE occurs even without spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and is converted into SHE through SOC. The resulting spin Hall conductivity is large (comparable to that of Pt) but depends on the SOC strength in a nonmonotonic way. This mechanism is stable against orbital quenching. This work suggests a path for an ongoing search for materials with stronger SHE. It also calls for experimental efforts to probe orbital degrees of freedom in OHE and SHE. Possible ways for experimental detection are briefly discussed.
The interplay between non-Hermiticity and topology opens an exciting avenue for engineering novel topological matter with unprecedented properties. While previous studies have mainly focused on one-dimensional systems or Chern insulators, here we investigate topological phase transitions to/from quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulators driven by non-Hermiticity. We show that a trivial to QSH insulator phase transition can be induced by solely varying non-Hermitian terms, and there exists exceptional edge arcs in QSH phases. We establish two topological invariants for characterizing the non-Hermitian phase transitions: i) with time-reversal symmetry, the biorthogonal $mathbb{Z}_2$ invariant based on non-Hermitian Wilson loops, and ii) without time-reversal symmetry, a biorthogonal spin Chern number through biorthogonal decompositions of the Bloch bundle of the occupied bands. These topological invariants can be applied to a wide class of non-Hermitian topological phases beyond Chern classes, and provides a powerful tool for exploring novel non-Hermitian topological matter and their device applications.